


The Road Not Taken

by kartography, the_spin (kartography)



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:09:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kartography/pseuds/kartography, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kartography/pseuds/the_spin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The grass is always greener in somebody else's universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Road Not Taken

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[doctor who](http://community.livejournal.com/kartography/tag/doctor+who), [ten/rose](http://community.livejournal.com/kartography/tag/ten/rose)  
  
---|---  
  
Summary: The grass is always greener in somebody else's universe.

 

 

 

The Doctor leads an unpredictable life; he'll certainly cop to that. A surprising fact, considering he's the owner of a time machine and all. One would think he'd see a few more things coming now and again.

Case in point: when Donna puttered off to bed last night he'd had absolutely no inkling that by teatime today Rose Tyler would be dumping a duffel full of her clothing onto the entry ramp of the TARDIS just before throwing her arms around him and squeezing him so hard his back cracked. "Thank god, I don't think I could've lived through another Easter," she'd mumbled gratefully into his tie as he'd stared down at the top of her blonde head, momentarily speechless. "Promise me we'll never jump into a time stream near that bloody holiday ever again."

No, he definitely hadn't been expecting that development. Nor had he been expecting the surprisingly thorough snogging that came with it.

And if he hadn't been expecting _that_, well, you can be certain he hadn't been expecting all the dashing-about-saving-the-universe that happened a bit before supper. Nor had he foreseen the being-split-up-into-all-his-tiny-component-molecules-by-fiendish-alien-overlord that occurred in the process of the previously mentioned heroics, nor the desperate-putting-the-Doctor-back-together undertaken by Rose, Donna, and an unfortunately overenthusiastic TARDIS.

No, he'd planned simply to have a nice, quiet day at the seashore.

Funny, how he never quite manages those.

***

The Doctor blinks, striving to focus as his body puts itself back together around him. It's an odd feeling, with stretching and pinching and twisting where there's never been any before, shooting all down through his toes and up behind his belly button. Not like regeneration: all heat and flashing pain, that. Much more like what a giant rubber-band-person might feel like if there is such a thing, folding and bending over himself and snapping sharply back into place.

His mind clears but his vision's still oddly cloudy and he rubs at his eyes before he remembers. Right, glasses this time around. He digs for them in the uncharted depths of his breast pocket, then in the right coat pocket, then the left.

"What the bloody"- and that's Donna. He turns, seeking out a blob of colour that looks like it might have ginger hair.

"Oh my-." The exhalation to his left is Rose, and the fearful confusion shading her tone makes his adrenaline surge, makes his muscles string up tight, makes his hearts pound triple-time. Never done with the danger, he supposes, especially with Rose back in the universe. She's barely around five minutes (not that he isn't glad of it, of course) and the world's almost been destroyed twice over.

"What?" he finally manages to grind out as his vocal cords snap back into existence and he fumbles his glasses onto his nose. "What are you two on abou-"

And he stops.

And he stares.

At himself. Standing about four meters in front of him, brown eyes blinking back through glasses he's just fumbled on as well.

For an instant the Doctor's sure he's been body-swapped; wouldn't be the first time, after all. But when his hands clutch convulsively at his chest in an attempt to identify the body he's currently occupying, they come up with a handful of familiar brown pinstripes. He can feel the mole between his shoulder blades, and his fingers dart up to check for sideburns.

Yep, definitely still in his body.

Which is very, very bad.

His doppelganger has both hands fisted in his hair, most likely checking the length and texture, and from the stymied look on his face has just reached the same disturbing conclusions he has. The Doctor reaches out with his mind, feels the other man reaching as well and their thoughts brush over and across each other. He flinches at the recognition, and that warm, shivery Time Lord _knowing_ flares brightly from somewhere in his cortex. There goes his last best hope of some sort of cloning accident.

"Oh, crackers," says the man wearing his body.

***

"So you what, got cloned?" Rose and Donna stand somewhere in the vast neutral space between the two of them, both looking utterly lost and very small against the looming limestone walls of the dusty quarry. "Like the people in that hospital on New Earth, yeah?" Rose squints; he can almost see her funny little human brain grinding away and it would make him smile if the situation weren't so immediately, immensely dire.

Her face falls a bit as the wind whips strands of blonde hair around her chin, and he thinks she might be remembering Cassandra's clone, tattooed and pale and dying in her arms. Clones aren't generally built to last. The fear shivering around her eyes when he catches her chin gently confirms it; she's seeing the death of something with his face, with his eyebrows and his teeth and his ears.

"Not cloned," he reassures her.

"Then how the _bleeding hell_ are you standing in two places at once?" Donna's edging into hysteria now; in her defense, it's been a trying day. Saving the world and all. "Time travel? One from the past and one from the future or something?"

The other Doctor rises smoothly, satisfied with what appeared to be a close inspection of his shoelaces. "Not as such, no. More like doubled. Not twins, not clones, not parallel versions of myself, but the exact same person, made up of the exact same atoms vibrating at the exact same frequency at the exact same point in their temporal existence, occupying our space-time twice."

Donna stares at him.

"In other words," not-him amends, "the TARDIS bollocksed it. Got a bit overzealous, I'd imagine."

Rose's eyes dart uncertainly between the two of them. "So which one of you is the real Doctor?" and he sighs, because he knew this was coming and he's not quite sure how to give her the answer she wants. Humans, with their silly, desperate need to define everything, to divide it all up, label it neatly and file it away. He loves them for it, but it makes these sorts of explanations a bit more difficult.

"We both are."

"Well," his other self adds unhelpfully, stretching the word out a bit longer than necessary. "Neither of us are, if we're going to get technical about it."

The Doctor can't help but roll his eyes. Does he always sound that smugly condescending? "Oh yes, thank you, linguistic precision is _exactly_ what we need right this moment."

His reflection quirks an eyebrow, nudges Rose conspiratorially with an elbow. "No need to get snappish," and the Doctor can't help but feel a bit put out when she gives the other him a hesitantly amused grin. He's about to protest when something tickles at the corner of his mind.

The other Doctor stiffens just as he does, his gaze suddenly very far away. "Do you feel that?"

He does, and he lets his eyes drift shut as he opens his senses to the universe the way they used to practice every morning at the Academy, all those centuries ago. Tiny waves ripple in the space between them, the fine-spun threads of reality snagging and pulling gently out of the tightly woven fabric of space.

"Oh, this is bad."

"Very bad."

"Very very, even," and they grin at each other, caught up for an instant in the strangeness of it. He's met himself before, but never without the knowledge that he'll one day be on the other side of the exchange. He thinks he likes this new uncertainty.

"Oh, honestly!" When he turns his attention back to her, he can tell Donna's mustering all of her considerable severity. Of all the people he's ever taken a jaunt around the universe with, Donna Noble is surely tops in severity. "This is the stuff of my nightmares, I'm telling you, Rose. Two of him! We'll never hear sense again."

"Well, I doubt you're going to have to worry about that for much longer," the other Doctor replies distractedly, head tipped as if listening, "as either one of us leaves or the Universe collapses. It'll be back to sense in no time."

Rose whips about. "What? What'd you mean, leaves?"

He grins now because he'd almost forgotten this, her mysterious, boundless concern for him. Silly wonderful things, humans are. It tugs at something deep inside and he reaches out, strokes her shoulder carefully with fingertips. "The same person can't be in two places at once, not at the same point in their linear timeline. Not quite a paradox, but wrong all the same. We're unraveling things bit by bit, just by standing here."

All swirling coat and agitation, the other man paces back and forth in the dust before them, fingers of one hand twisting in his hair. "How long do we have, d'you think?"

The Doctor worries his lip, contemplating, and Rose's fingers slip hesitantly down to tangle with his. Her hand is warmer than he remembers but the gesture is achingly familiar all the same. "A few hours, maybe. I wouldn't push it."

"Another time? Drop one of us off a few millennia away?"

He considers. "Don't think it'd be enough. Still two of me in the universe, operating on the same timeline. Temporal distance might slow the damage down-"

"-But not stop it," the other Doctor finishes, lips pursed tightly in thought. He grimaces unpleasantly and the Doctor makes a mental note to make that face less often when with company. It's not at all flattering. "Please, not E-Space again."

"Oh, no thank you." He ponders a bit, and then his fingers are snapping of their own accord. The sound echoes sharply off the canyon walls, snapping snapping snapping up into the growing dusk. "Pete's World."

"Pete's World!" Hands in his hair again, and the other Doctor spins victoriously out of the circles he's pacing around Donna.

"Pete's World what?" Donna asks, to her credit sounding only a little cross.

Not-him waves an bony, imperious hand in her direction, and the Doctor can't help but wonder: is he _really_ that skinny? He doesn't _feel_ that skinny. He feels quite solid, thank you very much, but this other him looks like he might blow away if the wind picks up again. He's reminded forcibly of a very tall noodle. A very tall noodle wearing a suit, and he certainly doesn't feel much like a noodle at all.

"One of us goes through the rift, to the other universe," the noodle tells her. "Problem solved, universe sorted, and everyone home in time for tea." He pauses, running a considering hand over his lips. "Well, tea-time tomorrow, I suppose. We've already had tea today."

The Doctor can't argue with that bit of logic, and they need to pick all this up a bit if they're going to accomplish what they need to without the knock-down drag-out that's sure to occur once Donna and Rose wrap their heads fully around the situation at hand. "Excellent, yes!" and he tries his hardest to infuse his voice with bright cheerfulness to mask any vocal indication of the sick dread currently bubbling merrily somewhere below his stomach. "Best be off then, pan-dimensional rifts wait for no man," and _please, please, please not me not me don't let it be me._

"Right," not-him agrees with nearly-convincing joviality, and their gazes connect just for a second and the Doctor can see all the knowing stretched out there between them, that recognition that one of them has a future, a lovely bright one traveling though all the wheres and whens of the universe, ricocheting gleefully about with Rose and Donna and the TARDIS. Yes, one of them will get a future and the other will get a prison, a prison with walls made only of time and space but a prison nonetheless.

And when you really get down to it, a cell built from the years of a life is much harder to wriggle your way out of than one lined with granite and limestone, sonic screwdriver or no.

"Wait a mo'" Rose says into the silence, and his shoulders slump because he knows Rose, so he knows that any chance they had of making this easy just flew out the window. "Two Time Lords," and she enunciates the words very slowly; they hover in the air, catching and pulling on the tiny rips in the fabric of time. "Two Time Lords, and one TARDIS."

"Um," his other self replies eloquently.

Donna's caught the scent now, and she spins around to stare him in the face. Terrifying, she is. He reminds himself not to cower. He's a Time Lord, for Rassilon's sake. "What, so we're supposed to abandon you? No ship, no nothing? I don't think so, Sunshine."

"It's got nothing to do with you!" he blurts, feeling a tiny bit peevish in spite of himself. "It wouldn't be with nothing; we'd leave supplies. What do you think I am, a barbarian? And what makes you so sure that I'm the one we're leaving behind? It could just as easily be him." He scrutinizes the other man. "Looks like he'd be quite fond of zeppelins, actually."

Not-him rolls his eyes. "Fiddle. We look exactly the same."

"Oh hush." Rose's arms cross stiffly over her chest. "We're not just dumping one of you off in another universe, sorry. Been there, done that, and it's utter bollocks." The sad little twist in the turn of her lips sets off a wave of momentary guilt and there's nothing he hates more than guilt; it makes his stomach go all squibbly.

"Well, I'd love to hear your brilliant ideas," and he's going to blame the unnecessary sarcasm on the squibbly feelings, oh yes. It's got absolutely nothing to do with how off-balance he still feels in her presence, with her hair and her eyes and her lips that he's only seen in dreams for so long now. It has nothing to do with how badly he wants to touch her right this instant, impending end of the universe be damned.

She ignores the defensive bite in his voice, meets his eyes levelly with a challenging look and he's struck by the changes in her; she's still his Rose and yet utterly unfamiliar, still bright and silly but with a new, hardened archness that he doesn't quite understand, that doesn't seem to fit right over her skin.

"I'll go with you, of course."

He looks at her, standing straight and sure in the hazy dusk, and his tongue is suddenly very heavy. "What?"

"Well, if you can't have the TARDIS, at least you won't be all on your own. 'Sides, I was starting to get used to the zeppelins. And Mum and Mickey'll be pleased."

The Doctor can only hope the look on his face isn't nearly as stricken as the look gracing his double's. The TARDIS or Rose. No perfectly lovely future for either of them, after all. Back to the same old life, a bit lonely but _free_, or be locked away in time with a woman he- -well, he doesn't dare think it. And his life had been looking so bright at tea-time.

"That's…" and the other Doctor's voice peters off. He clears his throat, pinches his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. "-very thoughtful of you, but not at all necessary," and because they're one and the same, the Doctor knows that when the other Doctor shoots him that sidelong glance it's because he's considering the logisitics of manhandling him through the rift and jetting off with both Rose and Donna in tow without so much as a good-bye. He knows that's what the other Doctor is thinking because he's working through the exact same scheme at this exact same moment.

From the very serious look on Rose's face, this plan will probably require lashing her to the TARDIS console. He's quite sure he filed a nice, sturdy length of rope under "R" in the appropriate chest, alongside Rattigan and Rassilon and Rowling. She's frowning at him now with startling perception, and he wonders idly if she's possibly become slightly psychic during her time in the other universe.

Yes, he's definitely going to need that rope.

***

There is a great deal of arguing and noise and arm-waving after that; Rose against two Doctors, Rose and a Doctor versus the other Doctor, and finally a Doctor going head-to-head with a Doctor while Rose and Donna look on from the sidelines.

"I'm staying with the TARDIS. It's my ship just as much as yours, thanks."

"Fine. Rose and I will have a _brilliant_ time in the other universe, then."

"Well if you're going to be like that, take the bloody TARDIS. See if I care."

"OI." They both turn to stare at Donna. "Since everyone's clearly gone bonkers, I'm in charge and we're going to listen to _me_ now."

***

In the end, the decision is so very simple. The rest of his life, decided by the flip of a coin.

"Call it," Donna tells the other him with a great deal less sympathy than the Doctor thinks the situation calls for. The man looks for a long moment, over his shoulder at the TARDIS and then back at him. His eyes glint, catch the light like Andolosian steel.

"Tails," the other Doctor replies finally, "means he goes with Rose and I take the TARDIS."

Donna nods, rolls the coin she'd dug out of the depths of her jacket around her fingers. He steels himself, tries very hard not to look at Rose, quiet and waiting off to their left with her fists shoved deep into her pockets. He's not quite sure what he's hoping for.

The silver pound spins up into the air, and a small, traitorous voice at the back of his mind whispers _Heads, oh please let it be heads_.

Queen Elizabeth smiles up at him from the dust.

***

They tramp silently back to the TARDIS, moon now hanging high above them in the sky. The other Doctor disappears immediately into the depths of the ship, muttering something about supplies and saying good-bye, which leaves him standing awkwardly with Rose and Donna in the main control room. He's not sure what to say, so he busies himself at the console, throwing switches and levers to get them back to the spot where Rose had popped into this reality earlier this morning.

"Very odd place for a rift," he starts, if only to escape the highly uncomfortable silence. "Right next to the shark tank. Do you think there's some significance to it?"

"What, like carnivorous sea creatures have some sort of destabilizing effect on the universes?" she asks from very near his shoulder, her breath brushing his neck and her voice thick with unshed tears. "Could be."

He turns abruptly, accidently bumping her nose with his shoulder, and he catches a glimpse of Donna escaping quickly into the hallway. "You don't have to go," he tells her, trying not to sound too desperate because he's got the TARDIS and his freedom, but he's suddenly not at all sure it's everything that he wants. "There's still so much for you to see. The scarlet jungles of Elsaltia. The golden cities of Frappis Prime." She says nothing, head tilted up to watch his face. Her eyeliner's starting to smudge and oh Rassilon, he's just gotten her back and he's never going to see her again. She's never again going to smile at him or roll her eyes or punch his arm or eat the last of the biscuits without putting them on the shopping list. "He'd understand. I would understand."

Her eyes are dark and deep. "I couldn't. I couldn't live with myself, knowing that you were out there all alone."

"Right," and there's a very odd feeling in his chest that he doesn't like at all.

"You'll be all right, yeah? You and Donna and the TARDIS, having a right laugh," she tells him, voice wavering only a little. "You've got a whole universe to see. Tomorrow'll be just the same as yesterday."

He doesn't know what to say to that; wrapping her in a tight hug seems as good a response as any. She clutches at his jacket, buries her face in his neck and he tries to memorize how she feels against him, tries to burn the smell of her hair into his brain. This is such a different goodbye, he thinks desperately, because he ached so much that first time on the beach but he could convince himself his sorrow was for her, for leaving her trapped where she didn't want to be. This time, Rose will have a Doctor like she wants and he won't be able to pretend the hollow throbbing in his hearts isn't purely selfish.

The embrace breaks when they're bounced violently against a nearby lever; the TARDIS heaves and groans as is settles into their destination. He can feel something like displeasure at the back of his mind; the ship is as unhappy with this development as he is.

"We're there, then?" the other Doctor asks carefully from the entryway, his trans-dimensional pockets bulging at the seams. The Doctor doesn't want to contemplate how many of his things he'll find missing later, though he supposes he really isn't in any position to complain. He'd want all the gizmos he could carry as well if he were the one about to be stranded without a time machine on twenty-first century Earth, Rose or no Rose. He realizes he's staring at the other man's trainers, avoiding his face on instinct alone. Eye contact with oneself is a bit jarring when not standing in front of a mirror. He forces himself to look up.

The other man looks oddly grey as he crosses the room to stand by the console on Rose's other side. His fingers stretch out to gently stroke a nearby panel, a farewell to his oldest friend, and the moment is so intimate the Doctor can't bear to watch. "I'll just go find Donna so you can be off," he blurts, choking a bit on the words, and nearly trips over the grating in his rush to escape.

***

He doesn't look for Donna at all, instead wanders the hallways and wonders what it would be like, saying farewell to his ship, to this place that's been his home for nearly all of his very long life. His only constant for so many years.

His hands brush affectionately along the decorative molding on the wall, trace the fading patterns of the wallpaper. He doesn't recognize this hallway; he's almost certain he's never seen it before in his life. Perhaps it's new, made just for him to wander and feel melancholy in. The wood paneling is exactly the right shade for melancholy.

"I'd never want to leave," he tells the empty hallway gratefully, "absolutely never. It's just…"

The wood warms slightly under his hand, and he knows she understands.

***

When he finally returns to the console room with Donna in tow, the other Doctor is looking a bit less gray. His eyes are wet, and so are Rose's, and the Doctor tries not to notice their tightly clasped hands. Better not to think about it, he tells himself. Better not to dwell on what might've been.

"Well then," he says, and the four of them walk out the TARDIS doors and into the darkened halls of the National Aquarium in Sydney. A hammerhead glides smoothly by behind the glass, and the other Doctor drops Rose's hand, moves to make his goodbyes to Donna. The Doctor finds himself again faced with Rose.

"So," she says, sniffling discreetly behind her hand. "Take care of yourself, yeah?"  
He nods, not trusting his voice. She is lovelier than he remembers her being, her face older and her eyes wiser. She steps closer to him, tips her head up for a kiss but he _can't_, he just can't open that door again so he dips his head, presses his lips very softly against her forehead instead.

"Have a brilliant life," he manages, and then Donna is beside him again, fingers squeezing his elbow, and Rose and the other Doctor disappear through the rift in a fizz of static and metallic tang.

He turns sharply on his heel, escapes back into the TARDIS. Donna is snuffling into her sleeve somewhere behind him. "You're a bit of all right, you know," she says and he wonders what his other self said to her. All sorts of sappy things, no doubting it, and now she's going to treat him like her favorite puppy for at least a week.

He begins jabbing buttons on the console with a bit more force than necessary because he suddenly wants nothing more than to get far away from here, to forget this entire messy incident happened at all.

Silence hangs heavily over them. When he looks up, Donna is watching him, mouth soft and downturned. "I'm sorry," she tells him quietly.

He grabs a lever, jerks it upwards as hard as can. Something inside the panel creaks dangerously. "Don't be. I kept the TARDIS." He grabs the mallet, closes his eyes and lets himself harden. "I won." The impact echoes through the ship; the rotor wheezes in protest.

It's the truth, even if he's not quite sure he believes it himself.

***

He gapes at the lab. "Everything. That bastard took bloody _everything_.

Donna raises a skeptical eyebrow at the remaining technology cluttering the benches. "Plenty of junk still here, if you ask me."

"Exactly. Junk. He took everything worth having! The neutron flow converter, the plasma transmogrifier…" He trails off, remembers that he wasn't wearing his coat when he was doubled. He checks his pockets desperately. "He took my screwdriver!"

"There's five screwdrivers sitting in the basket right in front of you."

"But he's taken the good one, the one with all the new modifications! I spent ten years perfecting that one. Ten years!"

Donna just looks at him, unimpressed. "Well. Suppose you better get cracking then."

And he does, grumbling all the while.

***

Time passes. They find lots of trouble.

They help UNIT save the Earth from an invasion force of telepathic salamanders; after they've blown up the satellite broadcasting the mind-control signal, Martha invites them both to her wedding. The Doctor very nearly refuses the invitation, but assents off Donna's look. Once they make it back to the TARDIS, the Doctor stalls as much as he can but Donna's not having it. He hates weddings, depressing, stuffy things that they are.

"Let's go today," she says, a little over a week later. "You said yourself you're not in the mood for hiking so the mountains are out, and I could really go for a nice piece of cake.

"Why are you in such a hurry? We've got a time machine. We could wait fifty years and still 'make it to the church on time', as they say."

Donna narrows her eyes; she's cottoned on to his tricks in a way so many of his traveling companions never did and as much as he likes her it's a bit annoying, really. "Yeah, but then when you accidently run into her future self and we haven't gone yet than you've forever missed the wedding and you'll be in a world of trouble."

He tries not to grumble; he swears to himself that the next person he asks to travel in the TARDIS is going to be exceedingly stupid.

So they get all dressed up (Donna fusses with her hair for ages) and he stands in the back of the church and thinks about how much he truly detests weddings, especially his own.

He has a troubling thought as Martha is reciting her vows; there's another version of him running around on another Earth and living a very humanish life. What if the idiot goes and does something stupid like getting married again? He tries to imagine it, a human ceremony in a church and him waiting at an altar very much like this one. When Rose appears in a wedding dress, he starts to feel very, very itchy and more than a little nauseous.

"D'you think they'll get married? Him and Rose, I mean?"

Donna stares wide-eyed, and perhaps he spoke a bit too loud for the middle of a wedding ceremony; several heads turn to look in their direction. She steps on his foot very hard.

"Ow!" More heads swivel, and he shuts his mouth determinedly.

"No, I really don't," she hisses at him under her breath, "because I can't imagine a universe where a woman in her right mind would agree to marry you."

He considers that. "Yes, but can you imagine a universe full of zeppelins?"

She blinks. "What?"

"Exactly."

***

Martha hugs them both endlessly in the greeting line, genuinely glad they came. She introduces them to Tom, who seems sharp and just the sort of man Martha should be marrying. ("Find me one of those, please," Donna murmurs to him after shaking the man's hand). He gets a bit depressed after the toasts because he keeps having highly unsettling visions of himself and Rose shoving cake gleefully into each others' faces, so he eats all the shrimp and about 35 bacon-wrapped scallops at the reception and makes himself violently ill.

Donna notices, likely susses out what's wrong as she tends to do, and is uncharacteristically sweet to him for an entire week after the wedding. She makes tea every day, which she never does, and in a last ditch to cheer him up makes four batches of lemon bars, which he adores. He adores lemon bars, but he detests being mothered, so after she goes to bed he eats all four batches in one go out of spite and is violently ill yet again. She stops being nice after that, and lets him bang all the doors on the ship to his hearts' content until he gets bored with it, which only takes about three days.

***

Time passes. They find lots of trouble.

***

They visit a lovely little market in a town in 19th century Gloucestershire to pick up some milk because the Doctor drank the last of it with his tea and didn't leave any for Donna. Through a convoluted series of events involving Donna posing as a milkmaid and the Doctor having a big mouth and no mental filter, they end up discovering vaccination with Edward Jenner completely by accident.

After that, they catch the 235th Annual Interstellar Regatta in the Betazoid system and become unwilling participants in the race when protestors hijack their observation boat. The Doctor foils the plot of a terrorist cell of xenophobic Dolvians who hope to sabotage the hard-won peace in the system, and Donna, very much to her own surprise, takes second place in the regatta and goes home with a very large, very shiny trophy. The TARDIS makes a trophy shelf in the library just for her, complete with a little plaque that reads "Donna Noble," which makes the Doctor smile and stroke the console even more than usual.

***

Time passes.

They stumble into a bloodless revolution; Donna falls in love.

***

His name is Taxxeiseid; he's one of the university professors who helps them lead the student uprising on Bastenia Majora. She calls him 'T' because she can't pronounce his name. They are perfect together, even if his skin is a bit green and clashes horribly with her hair. They fit in a way that hurts him, mostly because it makes him wonder if he himself is currently fitting that way with a certain someone in another universe.

The Doctor finds it very difficult to feel put out when she tells him she's staying. He always knew she would leave someday and he can't help but be proud that she could find her happiness on a planet other than Earth. She tells him they're getting married that very day so he doesn't have a chance to escape because she wants him at the wedding and she knows that if he leaves, even for a minute, he's never coming back.

He laughs. "You've got me pinned, Donna Noble." He hugs her, kisses her cheek.

And he slips away while she isn't looking.

***

The day after he leaves Donna, he sets the TARDIS on the randomiser. When the doors open, he steps out and directly into a pile of brooms, which fall and clatter and hit him repeatedly in the face. She's landed them in a very small supply cupboard. "Oh, ha ha. Hilarious."

But he goes out exploring anyway because that's the whole point; he escapes the brooms and the cupboard and finds himself in a sprawling, cluttered factory. 76th century, somewhere in the Human Empire, he guesses. The air hangs heavy and sticky-sweet and there's an odd sort of tinkling in the air, like hundreds of thousands of wind chimes all swaying together on the breeze. A bottling plant?

There's a bored-looking humanoid pulling a lever over and over just down the way; the Doctor jogs over to him. "Excuse me, but would you mind telling me what sort of factory this is?"

The man blinks four very round eyes at him, and very obviously decides the Doctor is an idiot. "It's the Lippman plant. Clearly."

The Doctor blinks. "Not…" and he does the temporal math very quickly in his head, "Lipmann's Old Time Jams and Jellies? Lipmann's Old Time Jams and Jellies, the best jams and jellies in the entire Beta sector?"

"That'd be the one."

He swallows very hard, tries not to burst into delighted laughter because yes, Donna Noble was brilliant and wonderful and stayed for ten years, longer than anyone's stayed ever, but he's still got his best mate by his side, his very best mate in the entire Universe, his glorious, brilliant ship.

"I don't suppose there's some sort of factory tour? A tasting tour, perhaps?" Please say yes, he thinks, because he's not in the mood to get chucked out by security after he's dipped all his fingers in the vats of boysenberry jam.

"Tourists," the man wheezes softly through his small, sawed-off tusks. "The sign-up for the tour is up that hall, right next to the little shop."

***

Time passes. Companions come and companions go. He snogs Moon Princesses and scales volcanoes and sees stars and moons and black holes and brown holes and even a few yellow ones. Every day is different and yet, every day he feels the same. Every day he wonders; what if? Not that 'what if's' are at all unusual for Time Lords; every thought, every moment of his existence is filled with what ifs and maybes and possiblys and 'what could go wrong if I press this lovely red button?'s.

It's just.

It's just that all the "what if's" in his life that don't come to pass generally stay firmly in the hypothetical. But in this case, in this one very strange and inconvenient case, the hypothetical is definitely not hypothetical at all, is definitely living on a planet full of zeppelins, quite possibly with a job and a house and a mortgage and a car and taxes and a wife named Rose Tyler.

And he's really not sure how he feels about that.

***

Martha calls him back periodically to help UNIT get themselves out of whatever stupid scrape they've bungled their way into. He hasn't had anything like this for a long time, a friend that he sees on and off, now and again. He's never quite sure why he's broken his own rules about repeat visits with Martha, but it's not going too badly so he doesn't question it.

He comes when she calls and helps her blow something up, and sometimes, after the explosions, they have tea and biscuits and they catch up a little. He watches her grow and mature and change into an elegant, capable woman and on the whole, all this aging stuff isn't nearly as bad as he thought it might be.

One day, he steps out of the TARDIS onto Martha's street, expecting a battalion of soldiers and smoking rubble and desperate, screaming mobs of people (the usual scenario preceding a call from Martha) and instead finds the tree-lined neighborhood quiet and empty except for Martha and two other people. Two very small people.

"I know you don't usually do these things," she starts very quickly, "but they wanted so very much to know you."

He blinks, looks down at the two children who are undeniably Martha's. They don't look at all like Martha in miniature as he sometimes lets himself imagine people's children, but he can see something of her in each of them: her unflinching nerve sleeping in the girl, her startling intelligence hiding behind the boy's eyes.

"These are my children," she says and he nearly smiles at how nervous she sounds. "Peter and Lily."

He looks down, pushes back memories of his own children, pushes back wonderings about small blond children his other self might be playing with right this instant, and considers them. They say nothing, simply stare wide-eyed and guileless back at him, and the Doctor finds, very much to his own surprise, that he wants to know them too.

***

Time passes, as it does, and the Doctor wonders.

 


	2. The Road Not Taken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The grass is always greener in somebody else's universe.

His mind runs in circles. Not that it's anything new; he's always been like that, looping and folding in on himself, but lately he's been especially bad. He's blaming it on the newest traveling companion; Paxton started off with quite a lot of promise, improvising a brilliant little lever system to pull the Doctor out of a canyon on New Jupiter, but has since turned out to be a bit of a dud. Horrible conversationalist to boot, so the Doctor spends most of his time conversing with himself instead of with Paxton.

Today it's Robert Frost, swinging round and round in his head, in and out and over and over. _Two roads diverged in a yellow wood_ his mind hums as they tramp through the brush, Paxton's machete swinging out in front of them to clear a path, _and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far I could_-

"Sorry, sir?" Paxton asks, and calling him 'sir' is only one of Paxton's more reprehensible habits. He briefly considers abandoning him at the next handy spaceport. "You looked at what?"

_ to where it bent in the undergrowth_, his brain finishes, and he shakes himself because he hadn't realized he was speaking aloud. "Keep your mind on the task at hand, please, Paxton."

Paxton glances sideways, and the machete swings off-course, narrowly missing the Doctor's leg and lodging itself in the base of a tree. "Sir, were you just reciting poetry?"

His mind starts again, a hiss of static and it slides back into the loop, _ and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far I could-_. He pushes past the boy, grabs hold of the machete and pulls until it pops free of the tree trunk. He starts down the path again without waiting to see if Paxton will follow, hacking at the vines himself.

"Sir?"

"Paxton," he says firmly, because he's old and tired and lonely and doesn't have the patience for this sort of thing anymore. At this particular moment it seems very unfair that there's another Doctor out there somewhere, probably tramping through some other jungle with Rose at his side, and he's stuck with this bloody idiot instead. "Paxton, do shut up, will you?'

***

He manages to reach heretofore-unachieved levels of rudeness, and he's almost proud of himself when Paxton storms out of the TARDIS to go back to school less than a month later. He spends a year or two just puttering around the Vortex, enjoying the silence and sneaking into Rose's room now and again to go through her old things. Twice she leaves him and both times manages to forget nearly everything she owns. Stupid girl.

He fingers her shoes, wonders if the older Rose forces the other him to take her shopping for new boots every other week the way she used to or if that's something she's outgrown. He nearly grins at the vision of his other gadget-thieving-bastard-self dragged through hundreds of Earth shops, loaded up with piles and piles of shopping bags.

_Two roads diverged in a wood and I-, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference_ his brain hiccups. "Oh, stop it," he tells himself, and leaves her clothing in an untidy pile on the floor.

***

Robert Frost is haunting him, that's the only explanation. The poem follows him everywhere; dancing in his head and refusing to leave.

"I bet," he tells the TARDIS one day, "that she got bored of him. She let him hang about for a bit but then she realized what an ass he is and she booted him out to make his own way, don't you think? She wouldn't stay. Humans don't do that sort of thing. They get bored and they grow up and they leave."

The TARDIS gives a non-committal hum, but when the next person he picks up (Isiola, from the Brodian system) storms out in a frustrated huff three weeks after she comes on board, he finds a worn, leather-bound Frost anthology sitting on the jump-seat.

"I hope this isn't meant to be therapy," he tells the ceiling. "I'm bloody sick of Frost." She nudges him back a bit too knowingly so he slams doors for another week until she locks him in the gardens to cool his heels. He sits in the patch of Saturnian begonias, tells himself Rose would've left eventually if she'd stayed here with him, would've gone back to school or fallen in love or settled down in a house because the thought she might've stayed with him as long as she could is almost too much for him to bear.

***

Time passes, and he sees very, very many things.

He doesn't care a whit about any of them.

***

He picks up a stray in a market on 31st century Venus; her name is Pida, and she very helpfully kicks a constable in the face as he attempts a jailbreak. He likes her spunk, sees a bit of Donna in her, and tells her he'll take her anywhere or anywhen as a 'thank you.'

Pida wants to meet Ezra Pound.

He tries not to roll his eyes because he's had quite enough twentieth century Earth poetry in this incarnation, thank you very much, but she loves _The Cantos_ and he doesn't have the heart to turn her down, so he sets the dial for 1914 England and prepares to be bored to tears.

He hits the mark for once and sneaks them into a literati dinner party; Pida fawns over Pound who's more than willing to entertain a pretty girl, even one as strange as she is. The Doctor steers himself away from all the poetry talk, instead immerses himself in a discussion with James Joyce on the merits of various pubs in Zurich. He's always liked Joyce; he's got a bit of the wanderlust in him.

But his evening takes a turn for the worst when he catches a soft American accent over the low hum of conversation. He swivels, and yes, _of course_, it's a tall, blond man with sideswept hair. _I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence_, echo his thoughts. He clenches his teeth against the onslaught.

Robert. Bloody. Frost.

He wishes he could say that the evening didn't end with him tripping Robert Frost with a neatly outstretched foot, wasn't followed by him spilling brandy on the man for good measure. He really does wish it; he and Pida might've parted on happier terms otherwise. His cheek is still smarting from the slap. He wishes he could say it hadn't ended that way but he can't, because it did.

***

Martha regards him over the rim of her teacup. The hair at her temples is starting to gray, and it suits her. He'd brought the children a toy chemistry set from a New Martian bazaar five hundred years in the future and they'd gone into raptures. He's starting to enjoy his status as a favorite uncle.

"What?" he says, because the staring's gone on a bit too long for comfort.

Martha sighs, sets her flowered china cup back onto its saucer. "You look like absolute shit, that's what." She nods at the new girl, Gresgra from Apollonia 7, through the window, still hovering out near the TARDIS in the garden. "What happened to Marcus? I liked him."

"Fell into a volcano. Poor fellow."

She shakes her head at him, closes her eyes. "That's what, ten new people in as many months?"

He bristles a little at that. "More than ten months for me, obviously."

Her eyebrow quirks upwards. "So what, four, five years?

He shrugs, and he can't help the disdainful edge to it. "About. Not my fault they all keep leaving."

She stands up abruptly, begins clearing away the tea. He makes a grab for a biscuit as she takes the plate but she swings it out of his reach. "Doctor, what's happened to you?"

His breath puffs out through his teeth because he's just realized that he's never told her, that Martha _doesn't know_ that there's a second Doctor out there whose life might be very like her own, Earthbound and full of houses and paychecks and children.

His brain loops.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. I took the one, as just as fair, because it was grassy and wanted wear." He blinks, sighs heavily and pokes at the ring of condensation on the table from his water glass. When he looks back up she's staring at him again, wide-eyed and concerned. "Nothing's happened Martha, don't be absurd. This is my life. Always moving on, you know that. After all these years, you know that."

She is very still; all the eons of his lives hang between them, heavy on the air. "No," she says slowly. "No, I don't think I did. I don't think I ever quite realized until now." She breaks the spell, moves to the window to look out at the TARDIS. "This is it, for you. This is all you have."

His teeth clench, because it sounds like pity. "I'm not human. I don't want the same things you lot do."

Martha turns back, and her eyes are unspeakably sad. "No, I suppose not. But- isn't there anything else? Maybe you could try something different a while, yeah?"

He doesn't reply, instead draws more watery rings on the table with the glass. He can't, because the only 'something different' he thinks he might want to give a go is locked away behind the walls of space, out of his reach forever.

"Nope," he says instead, more than a little unkindly as he swings his dirty shoes up to rest on the chair opposite him. "Just fine like this, but thanks so much for your concern."

The glasses in the cabinet rattle with the slam of the refrigerator door. "Stubborn ass," he hears her mutter under her breath.

She didn't deserve that, not really, and he sighs. "Martha."

She shakes her head, looks away. "No, no more excuses. You're not the man I used to know." With that, she turns away from the window and leaves the room and it's a dismissal if he's ever seen one.

As he makes his way upstairs to bid farewell to the children, he tries to remember why he thought this keeping in touch nonsense was a good idea. He comes up empty and there's nothing left but cold tucked under his sternum. He hugs Lily, pats her on the head, and maybe Martha's right. Maybe something went wrong when the TARDIS put him back together all those years ago; maybe he's a different man after all.

He grins down at Peter, twelve years old and all trouble. "You two like the chemistry set, I see?"

They grin back, because the room's already filled with phosphorescent bubbles of all shapes and sizes. The air smells strongly of latex and candied yams, a hospital at Christmastime. He leans down conspiratorially, puts a hand on Peter's shoulder. "Try mixing the red and the blue. Brilliant explosion. It'll put your Mum through the roof."

He meets Gresgra outside on the lawn. She twitches, shoots a glance over her shoulder. She's mousey and a bit fearful; the normal state of affairs for her race, unfortunately. At least she doesn't ask uncomfortable questions.

"Finished so soon?""

He's about to shrug it off, but just then there's a tremendous 'bang' behind them, chased by the sound of raucous laughter. They turn to look; the windows on the third floor of Martha's house are belching thick orange mist out into the air. He grins but it feels all wrong, jagged and crunching like broken glass between his teeth. The TARDIS door squeals angrily on its hinges as he pushes it open, walks through the threshold.

"Doctor," Gresgra stutters hesitantly. "Shouldn't we go back to help?"

"Perfectly harmless," and his spirits lift a little as Martha's very audible shriek of frustration echoes down the road. "Leaves awfully nasty stains, though. Pity, it was such a lovely home."

The door slams loudly behind him.

***

Time passes and Gresgra leaves, like they all do. He doesn't miss her.

***

He saves an industrial M-class planet from drowning in its own waste with the help of two wide-eyed interns at the capital's sewage management planet. They hold the torch steady and hand him tools as he lies flat on his back for hours, carefully diverting the energy flow from the nuclear disposal reactor so they don't blow off the crust of the planet by accident. As they work he tells them about the stars, about planets where the air is clean and the trees are alive and the sky isn't scorched a streaky black. And they listen.

When it's time to leave, after the victory march and the cheering and the fireworks, the Doctor slips away to the TARDIS without a goodbye.

But they surprise him; he turns a corner and there they are, two young people with their newly purchased business suits smudged with grease stains and soot, waiting determinedly by his blue wooden front door.

"Take us with you," the girl says as he stands, gaping at them. "Please, Doctor. We want to see the stars. We want to see blue sky."

He nearly laughs; the boy's even packed a bag. Well, a briefcase. Their mouths are set and serious and he thinks that they'd both print up business cards to tuck into their sharp little suit pockets if they came with him, would pass them out after a firm handshake on a thousand different alien worlds. New eyes, they have, and a thirst for adventure, and maybe that's exactly what he needs.

But then something creaks behind his temples _and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far I could_ and he's not seeing the polished buttons on their fitted suit-coats anymore. He sees Martha's children instead, sees Rose grinning fiercely at him, sees a house and a life and all those silly humanish things he'll never have and he can't face that every day, every moment for the rest of his life.

"I'm sorry," he tells them instead, "but I travel alone."

He leaves them standing under the blackened sky.

***

Time passes, and the Doctor's almost sure he's seen everything in the Universe. He'd always thought the rest of the Time Lords were mad for sitting on Gallifrey and watching the rest of the solar systems spin their way through time below them, for not going out and diving in and living it. But now he's starting to think that maybe they knew better, that they were tired of it all and he didn't understand because he was young and stupid and everything still seemed bright and new.

It's worn on him these past few centuries, the traveling, winding his way through hundreds of worlds with no one dancing in his mind but himself. He used to stand on the shoals of Woman Wept, on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, on the crimson cliffs of Nelshia, and feel inspired. He used to feel awed.

Now he just feels exhausted.

***

Two hundred and thirty-four years after she walked away through the rift that he closed behind her, the Doctor realizes that Rose Tyler is dead.

The morning starts much the same as any morning: an amble through the twisting corridors with a stop to rearrange the knick-knacks on Rose's dresser, followed by a few hours lazing in the library.

But the Frost is chasing him today and he can't concentrate at all on his reread of _Ulysses_, which is hard enough to get through as it is, so he puts the book aside and lets his thoughts wander down that oh so familiar path. He dreams of what he'd be doing right now if Rose had stayed, or if perhaps he'd been the one to stay with her. He tries to imagine what she'd look like now: would she age gracefully, the way Martha had?

The TARDIS shoves at him from the back of his head and he blinks and wait a tic, Rose was _ human_. Rose was human and if she'd stayed with him, she'd have been dead and buried over a century ago.

She's dead in the parallel universe, too; there's no more joking and hand-holding and whatever else she and the other him might've gotten up to. It must be terribly lonely and all in a rush he remembers why he leaves all the people he cares about behind in the first place.

Once they're out of his timeline they'll live for him forever, preserved for all eternity in their respective centuries, never more than a TARDIS-hop away.

After all, he still sees Martha from time to time even though he met her over three hundred years ago. Technically she died centuries before he was even born, and yet they still manage to have brunch every few months. He has friends scattered across the constellations, in every era, of every shape and size.

But he can't keep them because every moment spent in his company is a moment he gives up to time, is a moment of their life that he can't visit ever again.

If he leaves, they'll live forever. To stay with him a lifetime is nothing less than a death sentence.

 

He thinks of what his life could've been, a life with Rose and without the TARDIS. Jackie would be long gone now, and Pete and Mickey and everyone else, but he'd be stuck, barely changing as the Earth blossomed and withered and died and bloomed again over and over and over through the slow unending crawl of linear time. Would that have been worth a short human lifetime with her?

He closes his eyes against the silence in the ship.

It might've been, but he'll never know.

***

Two universes without even a smidge of Rose is too awful to contemplate. He blinks and finds himself in her room, sitting cross-legged on her floor amid a pile of laundry that's been dirty for centuries now. He's not quite sure how he got here.

_Oh, I kept the first for another day!  
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,  
I doubted if I should ever come back_.

He runs his fingers over the threadbare toe of a blue striped sock, gathers as much of the clothing as he can carry, and pads back to the console room.

***

He spins the dials, toes open the outer door of the TARDIS with his sneaker; gases and space dust swirl together in a lovely twisting dance of greens and blues and pinks as they spin lazily in space. He imagines her standing beside him, chin bumping his shoulder as she marvels at the sight. She was so very good at marveling.

"Alosha Minora," he murmurs to no one in particular; the vacuum swallows up the words. "It's collapsing in on itself. Going to go supernova at any minute and then all this will be dust. And the dust will cool and gather and coalesce and one day, millions of years from now, this'll be the Kasterborous system."

The TARDIS hums, concerned, and he tries to smile.

"Goodbye," he whispers, and tosses it all. The pile slides out into space, wobbling and weightless. A fuzzy pink sweater winds its way loose, catches in a dust eddy, collides again with a woolen orange sock.

He stands a long time, watching all those bits of Rose drift farther and farther away, pulled in by the dying star. He feels the question in his mind.

"She'll be part of it, forever. A billion tiny atoms of Rose preserved in Kasterborous, in you and in me until the universe dies. Lovely, don't you think?"

The star flares but he doesn't even feel the heat; the TARDIS is keeping him safe. He can feel her unease; she thinks he's gone mad. Well, maybe he has. She nudges him again urgently and he squeezes his eyes shut against the threatening tears.

"Oh, please. This was your bloody fault in the first place."

When he kicks doors for the next month, she doesn't try to stop him.

***

He's taken captive on the third moon of Krectionya; the Krection ocean is dying and the Central Authority is hoping desperately for a scapegoat. He winds up in a prison camp alongside hundreds of other captured space travelers, most of whom were imprisoned on charges of 'sorcery.' They murder his cellmate in front of him.

He escapes like always, and blows the prison to high heaven in the process. The Central Authority realizes what he is, what he can do, and they beg him to help save their planet. He could help them, he knows. He can feel the point of flux in the timeline. Krectionya exists in his future, after all. If he saves the planet, the future he knows is preserved. He should be merciful and take pity on the idiots.

Problem is, he's not feeling very merciful today.

He closes his eyes as the TARDIS takes off, feels the timelines shift as Krectionya dies, as the changes cascade all across the universe like a heart stuttering and skipping a beat. He is great and terrible, and no one will ever be the wiser to it because everyone who could feel the change is dead and gone and dust.

He's the highest authority in the universe, and no one will ever know.

***

Time passes, because he lets it.

***

He's tinkering under the console when static and garbled voices blast out over the radio transceiver. The TARDIS adjust the frequency; it's a distress signal.

"-running out of air. There are women and children, please, someone help us."

He's up in a flash, spinning the dials and tracking the signal, and then the ship rocks and settles and he dashes out to be a hero. A Time Lord's work is never done.

***

The space station is eerily silent; not at all full of the crying, panicked people he'd expected. He turns a slow circle. They've landed in a control room, and life support is most definitely functional. Plenty of air, certainly. The panels look jerry-rigged, constructed out of parts cannibalized from a hundred different worlds with wires snaking every which way. The walls are covered in scrawled messages in every color, all in different handwritings and languages.

He moves to the console; most of the circuitry has melted together. It's broadcasting the distress call on an endless loop, and when he checks the date he realizes the signal is over fifty years old. Whoever thought they might die here is long gone by now.

The lights flicker, and something crashes far below him.

Well, perhaps not.

***

He wanders the halls, following the dull clanking deeper into the belly of the station. Judging from the state of disrepair, the station's been abandoned for years. He turns a corner and the lights blink off, plunging him into darkness.

"Oh, bollocks," says a distinctly feminine voice from a ways down the corridor.

The Doctor frowns. "Hello?"

"Just a mo," the voice says distractedly and something about it catches and niggles at the back of his mind. There's a crash, a shower of sparks, and then the emergency halogens flicker on along the floor, bathing the halls in ghostly neon blue.

And there, standing just down the way and deeply engrossed in the contents of an open wall panel, is a girl that's supposed to be dead.

"Rose," he breathes. The light gleams on her skin, glints off her hair so she's hazy and backlit; he can't be sure she's real at all. At least not until she scrunches up her nose like that, until she tugs out a handful of wires and rips off the casing with her teeth.

"What, love?" and she's not looking at him at all, still up to her elbows in circuitry. "You said the blue wire, yeah?" She tugs again, thumps something with her fist and the lights flicker back on again. "There we go. Much better."

She turns back to him and his hearts are in his throat. He can't make a sound, can't move from this spot because if he does his legs might go out and that would be more than a little embarrassing. Not at all the romantic reunion he's half-hoped for.

She frowns at him and she's just as he remembers. Well, older. No more than a decade, though. Still the dark smudgy eye make-up that always put him in mind of a very fetching raccoon, still the fitted jacket (red today), still the wide, generous mouth and the two-toned hair.

"You okay?" she says, and the frown deepens with concern.

He tries to explain but he can't get anything out; his mouth works silently and he probably looks a complete ass, gasping and gaping like a fish out of water.

She staring at his shoes now, and the frown deepens. "Weren't those red this-" and he chokes a little and then she's looking at him with dawning comprehension as her hands slide up to press over her mouth. "Oh my God. It's _you._"

And before he can manage to form anything even approximating a reply she's barreling into him, practically knocking him to the ground with the force of her hug. He stands a moment, stunned, before his arms catch up with his brain and come up to squeeze her to him tightly.

"Rose," he finally gets out. "Oh, Rose."

She chuckles a bit tearfully into his neck, pulls back to look at him. "Hello, you." She examines him, fingers still clutching his jacket, and her face falls the tiniest bit.

"What?"

Her fingers come up to trace the lines at the corner of his eye. "You look tired."

He opens his mouth to deny it but then he hears the quick, even thump of rubber treads slapping distantly against the ground. "Rose?" a familiar voice calls from afar, "you're never going to believe this. It wasn't just a time portal, it was a-"

He jogs round the corner, and abruptly skids to a halt.

"A trans-dimensional portal, as well?" she finishes over her shoulder, turning to grin at the man wearing his face without letting go of the Doctor's arms.

"Hum," the other Doctor says, staring at him. "Well. This is a bit awkward, isn't it?"

***

They go back to the TARDIS; the other Doctor's face lights up so brightly at the mere mention of the ship that he hasn't the heart to say no when Rose suggests they pop back for tea before heading back to their own universe.

Not-him skips gleefully ahead but he hangs back to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with Rose. Her fingers brush his, catch and tangle. He tries to swallow, finds that he can't.

"I missed you," he says finally, just for something to say. He's not sure the words quite cover the depth and breadth of the sentiment.

She just smiles, disappears into the TARDIS after an enthusiastic streak of brown.

***

He and Rose have tea and sandwiches on the jumpseat; the other Doctor flatly refuses any foodstuffs, slides happily under the console and starts a barely-audible monologue as he catalogues every new modification made to the ship in the last three hundred years.

"So," he starts, very quietly so the other Doctor won't hear. "How're- things?" He sneaks a look at her hand. "Not- married or anything, right?"

She blinks at him, starts to chuckle. "Married? Honestly?" His face must show his confusion because she shakes her head, pats his arm a little. "I just mean- you know you don't believe in that sort of thing anymore." Her lips curve affectionately, and he can't help but notice the warm glance she slides at the trainers resting on the grating. "Besides, I like it this way. Nothing binding us together." Her hip bumps his and he feels his eyebrows scrunch but she leans back, the smile still chasing the corners of her lips. "D'you see? Every day together is a choice."

Something crashes beneath them; the other Doctor groans a little. Rose's lips stretch out into that full smile that haunts his dreams. "He's hit his head.: She chuckles a little nervously. "Well, obviously you know that. You're him, after all."

He smiles back at her, but he's not so sure that's true. He remembers being that Doctor certainly, bright and sparking and full of life. Does that man still live in him, or has he been lost forever on the lonely, winding roads of time?

"What in Rassilon's name have you done to the positron emission valve?" not-him demands loudly from under the console. "You've butchered-oh. Oh wait, that's brilliant! Oh, you must've increased temporal stability by at least four percent! Genius!"

He watches her as she watches her Doctor's skinny, pinstriped legs; the look on her face is warm and soft, the kind of look she usually reserves for kittens and ducklings and other small, fuzzy things. Usually that sort of face would make him feel supremely itchy, but now it leaves him a bit sad. Did she ever look at him like that, he wonders, or is this a brand new face just for the Doctor that went with her?

But then she turns back to regard him thoughtfully and her face doesn't change at all. He could fall into her eyes forever.

She smiles and it's almost too bright. "Hello."

He grins back and for the first time in years, it feels right on his face. "Hi."

***

They trade stories late into the night; he catches her up on Donna, and she tells him all about their life in the other universe. The life that could've been his.

"No house, either. We're nomads, really. We've got a ship," she tells him around a mouthful of biscuit. "Well, a space-hopper. Not any good for long-term travel. Nothing like the TARDIS."

He chuckles, because what in creation could possibly be like the TARDIS? Last of its kind, just like him. Then he has a startling thought. "He didn't build it, did he? There shouldn't be technology like that on Earth for _years_."

"Yeah, he said the same thing but turns out you were both wrong." He elbow bumps his ribs playfully. "It crashed, and we nicked it right from under Torchwood's noses. None the wiser. It was brilliant. You rebuilt the whole bloody thing."

"What?" calls the other Doctor from under the console. "And Rose, you should really have a look at this gamma radiation adaptor. It's inspired."

She grins. "I was just telling him how brilliant you are, actually. You brilliant thing, you."

A very smudged face pops out to look at them suspiciously. Then he smiles, apparently satisfied she wasn't making fun of him, and he disappears back into the wiring. "Well. Carry on, then."

The Doctor laughs, and something pops inside his thoughts. He's feeling lighter already, and it takes a moment to realize it's because his head doesn't feel quite so empty any more. He can feel his other self buzzing at the edges of consciousness, filling the void where his people used to be. He lets his eyes drift shut, savours the feeling.

When he finally remembers himself Rose is watching him measuringly, head tipped back against the jumpseat and face much less bright.

"How long's it been, for you?" she asks finally.

"Oh," he says, hesitating, because judging by her expression he's not exactly sure he wants to tell her it's been nearly three centuries. "Uhh, sixty years, give or take?" And it's not a lie because she didn't specify _how long since what_, now did she, and it's been sixty years give or take since he last rode the London Eye which is as good an answer to the question as any.

There's a crash and an indelicate snort from the center of the console, and the Doctor almost hopes the other Doctor will pop out to tell Rose he's lying, just so the Doctor can smash him over the head with a mallet.

"Sixty years," Rose muses, a bit sadly. "Such a long time."

His lips quirk up against his will. Humans.

They are silent for a long moment, Rose considering whatever it is that goes on in her head and the other Doctor still loudly blundering about in the belly of his ship. She fidgets with the bottom button of her jacket, seems to come to a decision.

"Show me around the ship," she says, pulling him to his feet as she rises. "I want to see everything."

***

Quite to the Doctor's surprise, "show me around the ship" turns out to be a euphemism, and he finds himself pinned unexpectedly against a wall in the corridor outside his bedroom. Her lips burn a trail up his neck; her hands work their way inside his jacket.

"Rose?" and he squeaks a little. How embarrassing. She ignores him, begins pulling off his jacket and he can't help but kiss her, has to brush his lips across her funny eyebrows and her nose. "Rose, are you sure this is a good idea?"

"Oh, hush," she mutters, batting his hands away as he tries to retrieve his jacket.

"It's just-"

"You look awful," she says very shortly, and he blinks down at her in surprise. "You look so tired. So just shut it and let me help you, all right?"

Her hands are working under his shirt now, and her fingers are wonderful and warm and Rassilon, he's wanted this for years. He's been dreaming about her for centuries now and he really doesn't have the strength of mind to say no, to remind her that her Doctor is only a few corridors down, banging away at the TARDIS.

"Right," he says, and grins. "Shutting up."

And his mouth descends on hers.

***

It's not at all like he imagined. In his manifold wonderings, the first time he sleeps with Rose is lovely and fragile and hesitant, all searching fingers and lazy wandering mouths and nervous giggles. But this Rose tangles her tongue with his assuredly, unknots his tie without even having to look. He fumbles with the clasp on her jeans and feels an idiot, even with her pleased, encouraging noises. She's not hesitating, not unsure; he can feel her claim on him in her fingers and in his toes and he knows she can feel it too.

She kicks off her pants and he has to touch; his palms slide down her belly, find the spot between her legs where she's wet and burning, and he sighs with her breathing. She presses into him, scritches the back of his neck with her nails. "I missed you," she murmurs against the shell of his ear.

He hums with pleasure because her hand just found a good place and the skin of her palm feels amazing sliding against him in just exactly the way he likes. "Me too. Every single bloody day."

Her smile breaks across her face, and the next thing he knows, he's flat on his back on the mattress.

***

There's something tickling his thoughts, distracting him from Rose's excellent breasts and the sweet rubbing friction of her on top of him. There's something hovering, a sad sort of longing, and he looks up.

Straight into the level gaze of his other self, who's leaning casually against the doorframe, sipping a cup of tea.

"Don't mind me," the other man says mildly. He freezes, and Rose giggles into his hair.

"Really and truly," she says. "Don't mind him," and then goes immediately back to the very interesting things she was doing to his belly button.

"He's not," and the other Doctor chokes a little. "Is he going to _watch_?

Rose meets his eyes again, grins, and he'd forgotten how terrifying she can be when she wants to. "Why not? He's you, after all."

The Doctor splutters a little, but then Rose is level with his face again. There's movement at the periphery of his vision, and then the other Doctor is there too, sitting next to them on the bed.

"Let us help you," Rose says, soft and a bit desperate. Her fingers trace his brow, and she's wet-hot against his thigh. 'I don't know what's happened to you, but we can help."

He wants to shout, to tell her _you happened, you stupid girl_ but then he catches the gaze of the other man, sees the loneliness he recognizes in himself. It's been so long since he's felt another Time Lord in his head, and the link flares to life, soothing synapses rubbed raw by the slow march of time.

He nods, leans up to capture Rose's lips again, to revel in having her close to him. She reaches behind herself and then he's sliding up into her body, warm and soft and incredible. He rocks into her, let's himself float away on the tide. Her head tips backwards and the Doctor watches as his other self leans in from beside them, closes his eyes as he presses slow kisses under her chin as he smoothes a hand down her back. Rose grinds against him with practiced ease and he can tell that she knows this body, that she and the other him have done this many, many times before.

Her muscles flutter against him, and he gasps. Her hips roll again and he can feel himself losing control but he needs a moment, needs to tell her what he should have a long time ago before the pleasure sweeps him away.

"Rose," he says urgently. "Rose, I love you. Across all the stars, I love you," and she stiffens on top of him and the look on her face and the face of his other self makes him quite sure she's never heard that from him before. Her face splits into a smile and she rolls her hips again and he's nearly gone when long, spindly fingers brush his temples.

Suddenly he's no longer with Rose; the pleasure's still there but he's standing on a cliff and everything's just the slightest bit out of phase, hazy and disjointed. It takes him a moment to realize he's in his own memories, that he's sharing thoughts with his other self that are jarring and overlapping, echoing in his mind all the stronger for it. He looks out and just then the sun blazes over the cliff and he gasps because it's _home_, it's his Gallifrey but it feels so much more real than just a single person's memory could. The sun is warm on his face; he can scent the sticky-sour sap of the Giloba bushes on the air.

There are tears on his cheeks, and as the pleasure crests, he watches the twin suns rise. Then the circle snaps into completion; Rose is there too, standing beneath the sky with him, fingers tightly entwined with his. He smiles, and they watch the silver trees burn with sunlight miles below them.

***

When he comes back into himself, Rose is curled between the two of them on the bed, asleep. He stretches, deliciously tired, rolls over to stroke her hair. The other Doctor watches him through eyelashes, propped lazily up on one elbow.

"Awful lot of closed doors," he murmurs to the man quietly, and he's not going to lie; he'd hoped to get a glimpse of the life he missed out on but all those memories had been locked tightly away.

Not-him snorts. "I could say the same for you. Having all sorts of adventures, are you? Didn't want to make me jealous?"

He shrugs. "Wasn't sure you'd want to know."

The other Doctor nods, shadows sharpening the planes of his face. "Exactly. Do you? Want to know, that is?"

He rolls onto his back, considers the ceiling. Does he? Would the knowing be better than constant uncertainty, constant wondering? Maybe that's what he needs, to pull the fantasy down and replace it with the truth. "Would you want to know, if you were me?"

Not-him pauses, looks down a moment at the woman sleeping between them. He draws a careful finger down her arm, which makes her murmur in her sleep, makes her roll closer into him. "Yes. I would."

***

They sit cross-legged on the bed in the darkness after he pulls his pants back on. They face each other, two sides of the same coin and he reaches, touches temples just the same as his own. His nail covers a freckle; he knows he's got one in the exact same spot.

He feels the door open, pushes open his own as well and then they're one again and all of a sudden he's got two lives in his head, three hundred years without Rose and seven-and-a-half years with her, running perfect and parallel. He sees a thousand tiny moments: her chin bumping his shoulder in a narrow hall, her thigh pressing against his on the train, her smile lit by morning sunlight as she wakes. He finds the first time they made love, much more like he was expecting, sweet and confusing and breakable. But through it all he feels a quiet kind of despair, feels the soul-deep longing for space and travel and adventure.

His eyes open; the other Doctor's eyes are wet. "You've seen so much," the man says softly, awed. "Done so many things. Met so many people. But oh, you poor bastard. Three hundred years and you still can't let go of her. And here I was, thinking I got the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

His mouth tightens because it's the truth, even if he doesn't want to hear it. "She'll die, you know. One day she'll die and then what will you have?"

The other man shrugs. "A better memorial, at the least. Honestly, throwing her dirty laundry into a supernova?"

He sniffs a bit. "Oh I don't know, I think Will Shakespeare would've loved it."

Not-him snorts disbelievingly. "Shakespeare's got absolutely nothing to do with love, you know that as well as I do."

Rose shifts, and he gets a flash of memory, of watching her sleep a hundred different times, of brushing hair out of her eyes and pressing a kiss to her forehead. "It's not what I imagined," he says finally. "You and her, I mean. I couldn't stop thinking about it, but it's not at all what I expected."

The other man smiles, leans back against the headboard and kicks out his long legs. "No. It wouldn't be, would it? But it's good."

"It is." Another memory, her laughing and laughing when he gets his arm caught in the access panel of a cybernetic brontosaurus. "Thank you."

The other Doctor smiles softly. "Glad to be of service. Thank _you_ for the stars."

He nods, watches his own face, and finally understands that this man is him, is really and truly him with the same loves and hopes and dreams and dark. He's been with Rose all along, even if he hasn't. "You'll need someone," he tells the other Doctor, feeling suddenly and strangely protective. "You'll need someone when she dies. Someone who understands. Find me, if you can." He doesn't want this Doctor to live what he did, to do the things he's done.

The man nods. "Rest, now," he whispers, and the Doctor falls.

***

The ceiling comes into focus slowly over his head. He reaches, remembers, and bolts upright, but they're gone. Slipped away in the night, he supposes. He should know, he's done the same thing millions of times. That bastard put him to sleep.

He rolls over, prepared to savor another memory, when he stops dead. There, lying on the pillow next to him, is an envelope addressed in a hasty, familiar scrawl. _To My Doctor_.

He bites his lip, brushes his fingers along the edges. A letter. She wrote him a letter.

He dresses, suit and coat and shoes just like every day, and he tucks the envelope carefully into his breast pocket before he strides out through the console room into the space station. It's too much coincidence, far too much that he'd been called here, to this exact time and place when she and the other him popped accidently through the worlds. Too much coincidence that he'd get exactly what he needed, right when he needed it most. He squints, turns slowly again, and strides to the wall covered in messages from the dead.

And there, among scrawled farewells to loved ones in a hundred different languages, he finds what he was looking for, written over and over in the spaces, inside the 'O's and tracking the lines of the 'N's. _Bad Wolf_, it reads, _badwolfbadwolfbadwolfbadwolf_ a hundred thousand times.

He laughs.

***

He spins lazily in the jumpseat, TARDIS humming and thrumming all around him. The letter weighs reassuringly against his chest, and Rose chuckles in his memory, punches his arm and spins him around. "How would you feel," he asks his ship, "about a day at the seashore?"

She hums a happy assent, and he digs into his right pocket. Pulls out two business cards, stained with soot and grime.

"But before we go, I've been thinking about taking on a few interns." He strokes the console, grins. "What do you say?"

He pulls a lever, and they're off.


	3. Five memories the Doctor never lived but still has jangling around in his brain, and one that he doesn't.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm stuck on Earth like an ordinary person, like a human? How rubbish is that?"

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[doctor who](http://community.livejournal.com/kartography/tag/doctor+who), [ten/rose](http://community.livejournal.com/kartography/tag/ten/rose)  
  
---|---  
  
**Summary: "I'm stuck on Earth like an ordinary person, like a human? How rubbish is that?"   
This is a companion piece to 'The Road Not Taken,' which should be read first.**

 

 

_Five memories the Doctor never lived but still has jangling around in his brain, and one that he doesn't_

 

OR

 

The Extraordinarily Mundane Adventures of The Other Doctor and Rose in a Zeppelin-Infested Hellscape

 

 

1.) Beginnings

 

The Doctor moves into Rose's old flat immediately; by 'moves' of course he means 'empties the contents of his pockets onto her coffee table.'

"I don't need a house, per se," he tells her as they stand in the middle of her front room. "Just a place to keep some of my things."

"Well," she grins, entirely too giddy in the face of an entire Earthbound life with no skipping through history to the good bits, "my coffee table is your coffee table." She squints down at the impressively large pile of gadgets. "You took the screwdriver? And- is that your plasma transmogrifier? Wasn't that _bolted down_?"

He has the grace to look sheepish, and she whoops with joyous laughter. "Oh, Doctor, he's going to be _so angry._" He can't help but laugh as well, and they spin each other in a mad jig around the living room before collapsing down on her sofa to admire his haul once again.

-

She enlists him to help at Torchwood to give him something productive to do ("consulting work, you know," she tells him, "play to your strengths: pop in, save the world, pop out again") and she drags him into the shiny-new Torchwood Tower and gets him an ID badge and forces him through a door into some miserable-looking morning group meeting. Luckily, the miserableness of the meeting is offset by the very fascinating pile of doughnuts on the table in the back.

"I'm not using this ID badge," he mutters to her under his breath. "That's what the psychic paper is for, after all."

"That badge swipes you into the building. Does the psychic paper do that as well?"

He hums a little. "No. But the screwdriver does."

Rose waves a hand at him, their universal signal for 'fine, fine, do whatever you want.' It gets a lot of use, that one. "I can't believe you nicked the psychic paper, too."

"I didn't steal it! Everything I packed was _mine_, technically speaking.

He's contemplating where waltzing over and grabbing a doughnut or three off the top of the stack might fall on a scale from 'extraordinarily polite' to 'fatally rude' when she grabs his arm and tugs him to the front of the room, clearing her throat. Eighty sets of bleary morning eyes turn to regard them.

"Everyone, this is the Doctor," Rose announces. Then she meets his gaze for a split second, and in hindsight he really should have been frightened by the glint in her eyes. She turns back to the crowd. "He'll be doing some consulting for us," and then she's leaning forward conspiratorially, "and he's an _alien_."

The assembled crowd draws a murmuring gasp, and the Doctor realizes a moment too late that he's just won Rose the grand prize in some sort of twisted workplace Show-and-Tell.

"I can't believe you did that," he tells her later as two stiff young men in ties press themselves against the wall as they pass, watching him suspiciously out of the corner of their eyes as if he might pounce and tear out their throats at any moment.

"Oh, please," Rose gets out through an enthusiastic mouthful of doughnut. "Don't pretend you weren't going to tell them. That's your favorite bit, winding them all up and then just popping out with it, 'oh, and did I mention that I'm an alien? Do pass the butter, there's a good chap.' You're just upset I spoiled your fun."

"That is completely and utterly false. I've never in my very long life called anyone a 'good chap,' for starters." The other bits, though, are quite probably true. He sniffs and rolls his shoulders a bit, trying not to notice the group of workers staring at him through the glass panel from where they're huddled in the break room.

"Wait," she says, turning to look at him again. "Wait, you really are upset."

"It's just," and he sneaks another glance. Still staring at him. "Are they always going to press up against the wall like that, d'you think?"

Rose's eyes are round as saucers and she's looking at him like he's every bit as alien as he really is. "I don't believe it. You're worried about what people think of you. Since when do you care what people think of you?"

"Well," he says slowly, turning it over in his mind. "I suppose I've always been able to just 'pop out,' as you so charmingly put it. But I'm stuck here for the foreseeable future, at least until non-hostile species who I can barter passage with show up or time agents start jumping nearby, which isn't likely to happen for a few hundred years or so. Can't even build us a ship to get off-planet; no one in this galaxy's developed technology anywhere near that and I couldn't risk someone else getting their hands on it. You know, forever altering the course of history for personal gain, et cetera et cetera."

"Ah," she says. She takes his hand, squeezes. "If it helps, I'm sorry." He smiles down at her because it does help. It does help, at least until he catches sight of the woman with the awful perm pointing at them and whispering with unrestrained glee.

This is going to be a very long few centuries.

 

 

2.) Meltdown

The Doctor is fine for approximately two weeks; two weeks is about as long as he can fool himself into believing that he and Rose are simply taking a very long holiday in another version of twenty-first century Earth, perhaps because Rose had developed an intense fondness for zeppelins and he was indulging her. He's always liked to think of himself like that in his fantasy life, as an indulgent man. He tries to appreciate the zeppelins aesthetically, tries to marvel at the interesting shadows they make over the streets. But after two weeks of them pressing down over him, hovering constantly and blocking out all his favorite stars, well, he's ready to burn them all out of the sky.

He stalks through the front door, and throws his coat a bit more violently than necessary into the coat cupboard. It slides sadly to the floor. "I hate them. I really, really hate them."

"Who?" Rose asks from the couch, where she's deeply involved in varnishing her toenails.

"Zeppelins," he says scathingly. She rolls her eyes. "Your step-father's a very well connected billionaire. Can't you have him, I don't know, orchestrate some sort of fiery, horrific, very public crash that'll have everyone switching to airplanes?"

"I thought you were against changing the course of history for your own 'dubious purposes?' Or I s'pose the constant lectures were purely for my entertainment?"

He grumbles, and slams the refrigerator door a bit. "I hate not seeing the sky."

When he turns back, she's watching him over the edge of the couch with something suspiciously like pity written on her face. "I know," she tells him. "I do know. They feel so wrong." She pats the couch next to her and he comes to sit, leans against her as she wriggles her toes against the table to dry them, and they watch the zeppelins circling endlessly in the air outside.

That makes things better. For about a week and a half.

-

Everything is all wrong here, the zeppelins and the flat and the way minutes tick by, one after the next, on and on and on and endlessly one in front of the other, each perfectly neat and in order and driving him mad.

He buys a plant, the kind with the fronds that curl up when you touch them because it reminds him of his garden in the TARDIS. It dies; he finds it all sad and brown and dry on the shelf. Rose looks at him like he's gone mental when he tells her about it. "You didn't water it, what did you expect?"

"How am I supposed to remember to water it?" he hisses, and really, how? He's got half a billion important things to think about. Is it really too much to ask that a plant show a bit of self-sufficiency? They live on their own outdoors all the time. His plants on the TARDIS never needed any bloody watering.

Rose shrugs. "That's why I don't have any plants. Always end up killing them."

He used to love twenty-first century Earth; humans are so delightfully resourceful, and it was early enough in their history that the technology was still all a bit backward. It was fun to see what they'd come up with, fun to click his tongue and think, "oh, how quaint, a stove that heats constantly at one temperature!" Somehow, that stove isn't nearly as charming when he's trying to scramble some eggs and he's burned four batches so far and has to keep chucking them into the garbage. In fact, the whole situation is not feeling charming AT ALL.

He chucks this batch of eggs into the bin as well with an angry hiss, and starts scrubbing at the burned rubbery eggy stuff congealed on the bottom of the pan.

Rose hovers over his shoulder. "What's happened? You never used to burn things on the TARDIS. You were always a really good cook. Get out of practice while I've been gone? Found some little woman to do your cooking and cleaning all this time? Can't have been Donna."

She's teasing but he's really in no mood for it. "The TARDIS," he grits out through his teeth, "comes from a far more civilized time and therefore has self-modulating kitchen appliances. It's impossible to burn things on the stove; the burner temperature adjusts itself automatically."

"Really?" Rose says, intrigued in spite of his very clear peevishness, he supposes. "So   
that's why I burned all those brownies when I first got here."

He can't help but smile a tiny bit at the memories. "You used to forget them in the oven for hours. The TARDIS always had to ring the little bell four or five times before you noticed they were done."

She pulls open a drawer, probably to find the other spatula, and frowns down at it distractedly. "What have you done with all the knives?"

"Oh, it's _my_ fault that the knives always stay in one place?"

""What?" and she looks utterly confused but he's just warming up now. These eggs have driven him mad and he's building up a very good head of steam.

"I mean, it's always the same! All the same, the hallways and the toilet and the carpet and the cupboard for the mugs! How am I supposed to _find_ anything if it all stays where you leave it? The carpet is brown and it's always brown. The walls are grey and they're _always_ grey. It's cramped and it's dark and nothing is twisty at all!"

He catches himself a second too late, remembers that there's no going back to the TARDIS and that he's stuck here and Rose is currently the only person in this entire hellish Universe that likes him at all (unless you count Mickey, which he really doesn't). He has a moment of terror that she's going to chuck him out in the street along with all the burned eggs and empty egg cartons.

Luckily, she doesn't seem to be in a chucking-the-Doctor-out sort of mood. "I thought you said you lived on Earth before," she says instead, very carefully and he thinks she's maybe trying not to corner him.

He sighs, because yes, he has and he doesn't remember it being nearly this frustrating. "I have. But." He rubs his hands over his eyes; he feels stiff and bleary and horrible. "I was a different man then."

"A more patient man?" she asks, and the smirk's returned, he can hear it.

He sighs. "Maybe. Certainly a less excitable one." He slips his glasses on, adjusts the frames carefully. "Besides, it was a punishment. It was meant to be awful. At least it was the Earth I liked. I don't know anything about this one; the history's all wrong. "

She watches him; he looks away, uncomfortable with the scrutiny. "And it wasn't permanent."

"No, it wasn't."

"And that's the part that's making you crazy."

He lifts his hands. "What do you want me to say, Rose?"

"This!" she says emphatically.

"What?"

"Doctor," she says, clearly frustrated with him. "Doctor, I'm bored. I'm so incredibly _bored._ He must look comedically offended, because she back-tracks very, very quickly. "Oh, not with _you_, you idiot, with this! With the flat and sleep and the taxes and everything. I've been bored for what feels like years now, way before you came back with me. That was the worst part of getting stuck here; I mean, I missed you terribly and everything but really the boredom's been driving me totally nutters."

He blinks at her. "So…"

Rose gapes at him momentarily. "So let's leave!" she explodes. "Let's travel! Let's see this whole insane backwards mirror-world planet! I know we can't travel in time but nothing's keeping us stuck here in space. I can do what I do for Torchwood from anywhere. Literally, anywhere."

He is standing very still because he's afraid that if he moves, if he makes a sound, he'll jinx it. "But, your mother…"

"Mum's busy with Nick and Dad, you know that. I hardly see her at all and it's not like I won't be able to visit, which if you'll remember correctly I was perfectly prepared to-"

And then he lunges at her in a surge of glee and motion; he grabs and hugs her and spins her around until they're dizzy. "Rose Tyler," he proclaims, far too loudly for the size of the flat and the neighbors are probably hearing him and it's wonderful because he doesn't care, he doesn't care at all.. "I knew there was a reason I liked you."

Strands of her hair dance in front of his eyes and he kisses her then, the first kiss since she took him completely by surprise on the ramp of the TARDIS, and she's grinning like a hyena when he pulls away.

"Well," he says and he's bubbling, fizzing, ready for the road, "what are we waiting for?" A thought strikes him; he pulls away to glance around at the cabinets. "Do you need to, I don't know, sell the flat? Does that take long?"

She laughs again, shakes her head. "Like you said, my step-father is a well-connected billionaire. You can have a million flats if you'd like. One in every city in the world."

"Well then," and his fingers twine with hers. "Allons-y, Rose Tyler, let's go!"

 

 

3.) Tea Kettle

 

He wakes slowly; the morning sunlight works its way through the hotel blinds to fall across his face. It's very strange, all this sleeping. Gallifreyans don't sleep much as a rule but the longer he spends here, living this life moving forward with time pressing down all around, the more nights he spends unconscious. Maybe it's the new linearity; time on his home planet is naturally a bit more wibbley-wobbley than it is on Earth, and outside of his time on Gallifrey he's practically spent his whole life in the Vortex with the TARDIS.

Could be that. Or could be the gravity. Could be that radiation in this universe affects him differently than radiation in the other universe. He makes an executive decision to explore this matter further, leaves a little mental reminder to himself to take some blood samples to play with in his newly designed mobile chemistry unit, which is really, truly excellent if he does say so himself.

Fingernails scratch lightly along his shoulder blade and he rolls over to kiss her awake, to nuzzle his nose against hers until she opens her eyes and smiles at him the way she's begun to do each morning. He grins to himself; it's highly possible that all this sleeping may come down simply to his being tired in new and very exciting ways.

Her eyes open. "Hello,' she murmurs, and smiles.

-

He wakes again when the tea kettle whistles; the low murmur coming from the bathroom tells him Rose is likely finishing up her morning Torchwood briefing. He rolls out of bed, and pours two cups of tea. The bathroom door opens and then she's there pressed up beside him, chin tracking his shoulder as she sways gently back and forth. She must be pleased.

"How would you feel," she asks, "about going out for a spot of trouble?"

He grins at her. "Just let me find my trousers."  
-

It's really excellent trouble this morning, with quite a bit of running and yellow slime aliens and even a very small explosion that he rigs up with his new mobile chemistry unit ("I _told_ you it would come in handy" he crows victoriously and she apologizes for laughing at him about it before), so when they're finally on the train back to their hotel in Budapest he's feeling very satisfied and a bit dreamy. Rose leans against him; her head bounces gently against his chin.

"Budapest was good," she says vaguely; she looks as blissed-out as he feels, albeit a bit more covered in slime. His fault, that. "I liked Budapest. Where should we go next?"

"Hmmm," he hums into her hair, and he really doesn't care. Anywhere, if she's with him. "I miss Random."

'Her eyebrows furrow; he can see them jump from above. "You miss what?"

"The Random setting? On the TARDIS? You remember, get jostled around and possibly knocked unconscious and then when you wake up you throw open the doors and it's practically Christmas morning! No idea what's out there! Total surprise." He thinks the metaphor through a little. "Very like Christmas actually. Sometimes the box opens and it's a Nintendo, and sometimes it's-"

"Socks?' she finishes for him, pressing closer. "Remember when we ended up on that ice planet, and those tree-looking things ceremonially froze me in a giant block of ice? That was definitely socks."

"Oh, I don't know, they did it to honor you. You should be flattered. Besides, I had fun there."

He can feel the sardonic tilt of her lips against his shoulder. "You ate ice cream for three hours."

"Yup," he says, stretching out his legs in the cramped compartment. "That one was a Nintendo for me. Good old Random. Much better than traveling by train."

-

Three days later, he wakes slowly in their hotel room in Budapest. They kiss each other awake. She smiles at him, and rolls out of bed to phone in to Torchwood. The tea kettle whistles. And that's when things start to go a bit sideways.

The tea tastes funny, that's the first thing he notices. He thinks maybe she's gotten a new kind and ugh, please not the disgusting pear-flavoured stuff she was eyeing in the shop the other day. But he picks up the tin and it's the same tea as yesterday and the day before and then his eyes cross and very suddenly he's on his knees.

"Rose?" he tries to say, but then everything dissolves.

-

He yawns, and his head bumps against the window as they hit what feels like a very large pothole. "Rose?" he murmurs sleepily, turning his head to search for her and blinks in surprise when he finds himself sprawled haphazardly in the back of a car, the woman in question sitting in the seat across from him and looking slightly stricken. "Rose, what-"

"Just, imagine you're being jostled, all right?" she tells him urgently, and she's not making any sense at all which usually means danger and that helps drag all his senses back to the present. He struggles to sit up "What's going-"

"Oh, you're so _difficult_," she mutters and he turns to protest, but then their wrought iron tea kettle is smashing fairly painfully into his head.

-

Someone is slapping him lightly; he bats their hand away from his face. "Ten more minutes."

"Time to wake up, Doctor, come on."

He blinks at the bright light streaming into the windows. "Rose?"

"Hello," she grins fondly.

He's still in a car. He squints, straining to remember, and then- "You hit me with the tea kettle!"

She nods, though her grin slips a bit. "Jostled," she says "and possibly knocked unconscious."

"I have no idea," he says very slowly, and he's scrutinizing her carefully for signs of mind control or brain tampering or anything that might possess her to be so blasé about causing him real physical harm, "absolutely no idea what you're on about."

She bounces a bit in the seat. "Open the door."

He opens his mouth to argue but remembers the kettle so he does what she says, fumbling behind himself for the door handle and tugging hard. The door swings open but all his weight was against it so he tumbles, falling halfway out of the car onto the damp grass outside.

"Christmas morning!" Rose announces from her seat with a great deal of fanfare

"Where are we?"

She clambers out of the car, takes his outstretched hand and pulls him to his feet. "A cattle farm, a bit north of Minsk." She grimaces. "Sorry, it's a bit socks. I was hoping for Paris, but what can you do?"

He's squinting at her and her fuzzy outline again because his head still feels like it's splitting open and all this sounds vaguely familiar but he can't quite put it together but wait- "This is RANDOM!?" he shouts, and it comes out a tiny bit angry. "You inflicted blunt force trauma on me for RANDOM?"

"You've got a very hard head." Rose says calmly. "I've seen it in action. Besides, I thought blunt force trauma to the head was the number one draw of Random for you. And I wouldn't have had to hit you at all if you hadn't botched the dosage conversion on the sleeping pills the other day."

"What do you mean, botched the-" and he is suddenly remembering her dragging him with her to the pharmacy two days ago. To think, he'd been pleased she seemed to want him around so much. "Ah, yes, that was very clever of you. Very casual, just strike up a conversation about sleeping pills and Time Lord physiology while we're standing in the aisle next to the Unisom."

She's grinning fondly up at him again. "Don't pretend you didn't love the little lecture opportunity. You were practically dancing up the aisles, rhapsodizing on and on about dopamine concentrations."

"Ah," he says, and his head isn't hurting so much anymore and he's looking around himself and thinking about it all now, the jostling and the car to Minsk and the cattle farm and the drugging and how elaborate it all was, and he can't decide at all whether he's angry or completely delighted. "How in Rassilon's name did you choose a cattle farm in Belarus?"

She hops a bit because it's chilly out here in the exposure of the field. "Told you, Random." When he raises an eyebrow, she hops again and sighs. "I opened a map, closed my eyes, and pointed."

The corners of his lips are twitching. "You were aiming for Paris, and we wound up outside of Minsk?"

She rolls her eyes at him. "I wasn't _aiming,_ for Paris. That wouldn't be very Random, would it? I spun the map around, even. I didn't know which side was which."

The cows make soft noises in the distance; her eyes widen with dismay. "Oh! I forgot the best part!"

He reaches for her to draw her close, to tell her he honestly doesn't need anything else, but she's too quick and digs a large plastic torch out of her coat pocket, which she immediately shoves into his face.

"Rose-" he starts, trying to swat her away, but then she flicks the light on and off into his eyes, on and off, on and off, on and off.

"Whoop whoop," she says, and he blinks away from the bright light to see her. Her cheeks are pink from the cold; her eyes are sparkling. "Whoop whoop. Whoop whoop." The words catch in the howl of the wind, making them echo in his ears.

He stares at her for a moment, before he realizes. He looks up. The plastic torch is blue. The exact shade of blue.

His legs go out from under him.

-

"Doctor!"

He's on the ground, legs folded and tucked up and he's probably sitting on a pile of cow dung   
but it was just too much, all too much in that one moment.

She's on her knees besides him, her fingers feeling desperately though his hair and all the playfulness is gone now. "Oh god," she's saying, voice tight with fear. "I really did brain damage you. How many fingers am I holding up?"

He reaches out to pull her tightly against him; she makes a small, sweet noise as she tumbles into his lap. His mind is full of her, full of the smell of wet grass and her laundry detergent.

"You're amazing," he says hoarsely. "I don't know what I would have done here, without you."

"Well," she murmurs, squirming against him. Her lips brush lightly over his jaw. "That sort of goes without saying. And just so you know, I did bring the portable bone knitter along. And about fifteen med kits; they're in the car. Also, I'm pretty sure Claude the driver is a surgeon."

He laughs; something works its way loose inside of him. "So, expecting some violence, then? Admit it, you've been looking for an excuse to brain me with a tea kettle for months."

Her lips curve against his neck. "Maybe."

He pulls away to look at her and then she's leaning in to kiss him softly, their lips chapped and sticking a bit from the wind. He breathes in her air, lets their breath mist together a moment, and then he shoves her playfully off him. "Well, Rose Tyler," he shouts over the wind, "the TARDIS brought us to this lovely cattle farm just north of Minsk, even if it is rather socks. I think this calls for a bit of exploring, what do you say?"

She stands, brushes the grass off her jeans, and loops her arm through his. "Absolutely."


	4. Five memories the Doctor never lived but still has jangling around in his brain, and one that he doesn't

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm stuck on Earth like an ordinary person, like a human? How rubbish is that?"

  
  
  
**Entry tags:** |   
[doctor who](http://community.livejournal.com/kartography/tag/doctor+who), [ten/rose](http://community.livejournal.com/kartography/tag/ten/rose)  
  
---|---  
  
_ **The Road Not Taken: Five memories the Doctor never lived (PART 2)** _

 

 

4.) Best. Day. Ever.

 

He grumbles very loudly as he lathers his shaving cream; he hopes she hears. She deserves it.

The heavy wooden door muffles her voice but she answers immediately. She's clearly lurking right outside. Spying on him, probably. Making sure he isn't climbing through the window and escaping out into the alley."Oh get off, it won't be that horrible. Fancy dress, delicious food…"

"I can't believe it. We're in Paris, my favorite city in the universe, and we're going to a cocktail party. A cocktail party on a _zeppelin_."

"Everyone really wants to see you."

He snorts. "Really." His lips curl as he tries to infuse every ounce of skepticism he possesses into the word.

"Well." She lets out a tiny cough. "No. But Mickey wants to see you! And Jake might want to see you; I'm never quite sure with Jake. Dad just asked that you try not to set anything on fire. No repeats of Christmas."

She pops into the bathroom; the razor slips and he cuts himself. "Tell me you're not wearing that."

She looks down, brushes out the tiny wrinkles in the satiny skirt. "Why, what's wrong with it?"

'It's a bit… exposed, is all."

She closes the door behind her, huffs out a laugh as she leans lightly against it. "For someone who's seen so much and married so many people, you're really a horrible prude."

"Four times," and he can't help gritting his teeth a little as he rinses the blood off his face, "and the last one wasn't even _voluntary_."

Her foot swings, hits him lightly on the ankle as she laughs again at the look on his face, reflected at her in the mirror. "Lighten up, you know I'm joking."

He lets out a sigh, dries his face with the towel. "I hate bloody Torchwood and I hate today," he mumbles into Parisian hotel terrycloth and really, he does. His brain keeps skipping all around, jittering to a stop when it should be going full speed ahead and it's making him cranky and edgy and nauseous.

"What, Time Lords never had work parties?" Warm fingers stroke the back of his neck, turn him so she can button his collar and loop his bow tie carefully over his head. "Never all met up and threw a glittery shin-dig at Time Lord Headquarters?"

"What you're not considering," he says unkindly because his head is pounding and he just wants her to go away, "is that an over-abundance of work parties might have been the reason I blew them all up."

Her smile slips away immediately and he feels a tiny blip of satisfaction, but instead of leaving like he expects her palm is suddenly pressed against his forehead and her eyes are bottomless with concern for him. "Oh, love," and her voice is strange and caring in a way he doesn't think he's heard before, "you've really been feeling terrible, haven't you, if you're joking about that."

He freezes. "You knew?"

Her breath whistles between her teeth as she blows it out slowly. "You've been losing weight. You're already too thin and now you look awful, just really awful." She digs knuckles into her eyes, and all of a sudden her can see past the façade, can see how worried she is. "And then two days ago, you took _a nap_."

"Ah." He thought he'd hidden it better but he can see how the napping might've been a cause for concern. He's concerned about it himself, to tell the truth. "I'm not sick, if that's what you're afraid of. Well, I'm probably not sick." The beveled edge of the sink bites into his back as he leans; this bathroom isn't built for two people at all. "It's unlikely that I am sick.

"Then what?"

He exhales a sigh, lets his fingers trace her elbow reassuringly. "I don't know, honestly. I just feel- smaller. Like I'm losing things, but I can't quite figure what they were. Like my mind just isn't keeping up the way it should."

Her fingers mirror his, stroking along the seam of his jacket sleeve. He watches her face, still and upturned and considering. "Sort of like time-lag?"

"Time- what?"

"That's what Mickey called it when I first got here. Like jet-lag, yeah? But days just didn't make sense any more, Monday-into-Tuesday-into-Wednesday and all." She squints, clearly trying to explain better. "I'd forget, and my brain would have to sort of hop for a minute to get back into it. It took me a while to adjust again, spring then summer than fall, one o'clock to two to three, everything on and on and all in straight lines. You and I, we'd been out of order so long."

He mulls it over. "Time-lag." The words rattle around his teeth like marbles. "But." He turns back to the mirror to finish his tie. "I've never been in order. And well, it feels like that, but bigger. I feel… less, somehow."

She presses next to him, wraps her arms around his waist in an awkward sideways hug. "It's been a long time," she murmurs quietly. "Nearly five years with your feet stuck on the ground. We don't have to go to the party if you don't want to."

He wraps an arm around and squeezes too. She seems very small against him like this, and it's jarring because she looms so large in his life these days, a gravity well pulling him in and in and in. "Was that what Paris was for? To cheer me up?"

Caught. Her lips twist sheepishly; he watches them in the mirror where they stand reflected together. "Maybe? But I like Paris. And Mum wanted us here too." Her chin bumps his shoulder, pulled into his orbit as well. "I want you happy."

"Rose," and he shakes his head, moves to fit her head under his own in what he recognizes distantly as a rare fit of tenderness. "I'm not unhappy, please don't think that. Everyone's always missing something; you've seen enough of the world to understand that."

Her arms clench around him. "Not me. I've got everything I need."

His lips tighten a little at that because she has no idea, _no idea_ how well he knows her. "That's not true. You miss _him,_ and she blinks up at him, startled and a little guilty. "I'm sorry, I know you don't like it when I listen but I can't help hearing sometimes, when we're- well. When we're close. You miss him, and every now and then you wonder what he would have been like, if he'd been the one that stayed behind and I'd been the one that went." He sighs deeply. "We all wonder. We all have regrets."

What he doesn't say is that it's a comfort to him, that she misses that other Doctor even when there's a Doctor right in front of her. It makes it easier to trust her when she says she wants him with her always; that she wants him around for life is something the Doctor would very much like to believe.

She is quiet; her breath tickles his neck for a long time. "I'm glad it was you, you know. Even if you're both the same man, I'm glad it was you."

He smiles a little at that, strokes the small of her back. "Well. We'd best be off then; that zeppelin's not going to wait for us forever."

-

The party is not nearly as horrific as he imagined; Pete is distantly welcoming and Mickey is mostly occupied with his date and none of the Torchwood idiots try to talk to him and the lights are very twinkly and Rose makes funny little noises of rapture at the artichoke puffs.

She drinks a bit too much wine and breaks the heel of her shoe; because he's a gentleman he offers her his own, which she accepts with no small measure of delight. She spends the rest of the night plodding around in his too-large trainers and her cocktail dress; he spends the night wearing no shoes at all, which causes quite a stir and the Doctor loves few things as much as he loves causing a stir.

Jackie is wonderfully drunk and hovers around him, gives him very unwelcome hugs while patting his shoulder and making vaguely maternal pronouncements as if he's one of her own children; he just barely restrains himself from reminding her he's old enough to be her grandfather several thousand times over.

She pinches the middle button of his jacket between garishly red fingernails. "You're too thin, love, have some more pie."

Rose finally comes to his rescue, gently tugging her mother away. "Mum, leave him be. He's on a hunger strike. Protesting the mistreatment of Alzonqian refugees, you know how he gets."

"Ahh yes, the refugees," Jackie nods sagely, and they deposit her gently in Pete's attentive care. They end up out on the observation deck, Rose watching the lights of Paris winding along below them and the Doctor watching the tiny lights of space above. He breathes in deeply, savoring the thinness of the atmosphere at this height.

"Alzonqian refugees? That was the best you could come up with?"

She laughs softly, props her elbows on the railing and leans into him. "As if she'll remember any of it tomorrow," and then they are quiet, enjoying each other's company and their temporary proximity to the stars.

-

Because it's a Torchwood party, or maybe simply because it's a party the Doctor is attending, the night ends abruptly with screaming and terror and aliens. Killer alien robots specifically, which makes the Doctor seriously regret giving his shoes to Rose after he kicks one of them on its robotic shin and bruises his toe.

"Get everyone to the escape pods," he shouts to the woman currently in possession of his Converses and sets about distracting the robots, which doesn't prove to be difficult. Whoever wrote their programming did a half-hearted job of it.

Rose finds him again in the control room; he's managed to barricade most of the robots in the lower ballroom, but there are more coming. On the stairs by now, he'd wager.

"Everyone's off," she manages to pant. "Blimey, I'm out of shape. I should start running in the mornings again." She catches her breath, straightens up to look out the view-screen. "Um, Doctor, I think we're going to crash."

"Yes," he tells her. "We most definitely are."

-

The landing is a bit rough, even strapped into the escape pod as they are. Rose is out of the safety harness as soon as they skid to a stop, throwing the hatch open and bounding into the street, just in time to see the _S. S. Queen Victoria_ plow spectacularly into the upper spire of the Eiffel Tower and explode into flames.

He follows, a bit more slowly. "Don't worry, it's been closed for hours. Even the cleaning crews are gone by now."

"You," she says very tightly and quietly. She sounds positively deadly. "You did that on purpose."

He tries to suppress the very wide grin eating its way across his face, and fails miserably. "The lever was stuck?" She turns to glare daggers at him. "Well, we were going to crash into _something_! They'd disabled the landing gear and punctured the blimp. Better the Tower than the Louvre, wouldn't you say?"

Sirens roar around them; a dozen fire trucks go screaming past. People slowly stumble out of their homes to stare in mute horror. A news van skids to a stop down the block. When the crew jumps out with their cameras already rolling, he resists the urge to clap with glee.

"It's awful," she breathes, a few tears spilling down her cheeks as she watches the blaze. "The Eiffel Tower."

He moves to stand beside her, framed by the dancing orange light as she is. "It's just steel. Girders and bolts. They'll rebuild. That's what I love about you lot. The human race, always rebuilding." He sighs happily. "The only thing that could make this better? Fireworks."

She sniffles wetly, pulls out her phone.

"If you're calling your mother, tell Pete to dump any stock he's got tied up in zeppelins."

She sniffles again, wipes her nose with her wrist. "Please, with the way you feel about them blocking your sky? I told him to dump it _ages_ ago. I knew something like this was coming. I knew it." She turns to watch the flames licking up into the sky again. "I may tell him to buy interest in some Parisian construction contractors, though."

There is an echoing 'pop' and another flash of light as the rest of the engine fuel explodes. The Doctor can't help it; he whoops with joy, hopping a bit and rocking back on his heels with the force of it. "I cannot wait for more airplanes!"

"Oh, you're terrible," Rose tells him, but she's laughing a bit now through the sniffles and he knows he's forgiven. He shouldn't be, Rassilon knows, but he is. She'll forgive him anything. It's dangerous, so incredibly dangerous, but he's glad of it all the same.

"You should be thanking me. Those zeppelins are a hideous accident just waiting to happen, you know that. At least this way it's a deathless tragedy. My absolute favorite kind of tragedy, come to think of it. And certainly the most difficult kind to come by."

She lets out a deep sigh. "You've got a point. And," she looks up, at the top of the spire burning orange against the stars, lighting up the empty blackness of space like the approaching dawn. "I suppose it is rather pretty."

"I'm starving," he tells the sky, chin upturned. The heat from the blaze is warm on his face and it makes him smile wider. "I could eat an entire baguette." He pauses, takes stock. "No, wait, make that about fifteen baguettes. And about two dozen of those little strawberry tarts. And maybe an éclair or two."

Rose's surprised laugh shimmers in the darkness. "Well," and her fingers wrap warmly around his, warm like the summer air and the fire and the pavement under his bare feet. "Let's go and buy out a bakery, shall we?"

 

 

5.) Endings

 

They've got their own trouble when Torchwood calls.

-

They visit a museum in Beijing; there's a traveling collection of jeweled Egyptian scarabs the Doctor is dying to see, positively hopping about them.

"But you've _been_ to the pyramids," Rose mumbles into his bare chest early that morning, only partly awake. "You were _there_ when they were makin' the bloody scarabs in the first place."

He pokes her side, right between two ribs. He's not going to talk to her until she's a bit more awake; totally counter-productive otherwise. She catches his hand after a few jabs, rolls out of his reach as she rubs the sleep out of her eyes.

"True. I also happened to be at the dig site the day they were unearthed from the tombs. Well, in the other universe. I wasn't there when these particular scarabs were made or unearthed. But. I haven't seen the exhibit at all, not in any universe!"

"And seeing them in some stuffy museum is different how, exactly? Same old pieces of metal they were a few centuries ago."

"Ah, Rose," and he's feeling playful this morning so he follows her across the bed, slides up to settle his body warmly over her own. Their knees knock together and his hips fit _just right_ between her thighs and he can't help but smile down at her, frowning up at him with her hair a messy tangle against the pillows. "Silly girl, we're not going to see the _scarabs_. We're going to see the story they tell _about_ the scarabs."

Her sleepy frown deepens; it makes him want to taste the little creases around her mouth. He leans in to touch his tongue to her skin. Her nails trail slowly up his stomach, fingers tickling pleasantly as they go. He's just starting to relax into it, dipping his lips to find her pulse point, when her hand reaches his sternum and _shoves_.

"Ugh," he mutters, abruptly flipped onto his back.

"You're a nutter."

He rolls to his feet, starts searching the room for his clothing. "That's the beauty of time travel, you know. Infinite perspectives on the same event. You live something, see how it really happened, and then you can jump forward to see how it's remembered. Or if it's remembered at all. So revealing, the stories we tell ourselves about our pasts." He finishes buttoning his shirt, knots his tie with a flourish. "History, the greatest psychological drama of them all."

He waits, stands over the bed patiently, because he knows she'll come. She always comes.

Finally she gives in and rolls over. "All right, all right, you win."

He takes hold of her outstretched fingers, pulls her up out of the covers to stand against him. He hums happily into her hair as she buries her face in his tie.. "If we hurry, we can get there right as they open. First ones in!" and she rolls her eyes at him but he pats her head anyway because as far as humans go, she's tops in his book and there's no one else in the world he'd rather drag to a museum against their will.

-

They amble through the winding hallways, past suits of armor and an impressive collection of cannons. Rose eventually wakes up enough to hold his hand and to make rude comments about passers-by to him under her breath.

"Honestly," she's telling him, even though he stopped actively listening about five minutes ago, "I had no idea you could even still buy fanny packs, let alone in that shade of magenta. I didn't mean to insult him."

He waves his fingers to stem the flow of her words. "Rose," he starts, contemplative, "I'm fairly certain _that_," and she finally starts paying attention, her eyes following his outstretched finger to the scarab nestled in the heavy glass display case, "that there, is not actually from this planet."

The Doctor decides quite firmly that the Egyptian scarab isn't an Egyptian scarab at all, is instead a religious artifact from the Lost Shrine of Elba that once stood on the fifth moon of Dornon, ("The cut of the stones is all wrong for Egypt, for starters.") and therefore decides he needs a closer look at it. A closer, illicit, after-hours look courtesy of the sonic screwdriver.

Rose doesn't believe he's got the faintest idea what he's talking about, he can tell, but she decides to tag along anyway, probably because she's never broken into a museum in Beijing in the dead of night with him before. Very open to new experiences, his Rose. He's always liked that about her.

-

She sits cross-legged on the floor, watching him work on the display case. She's staring and quite frankly, it's making him nervous.

"D'you think," he asks mostly for reassurance "that I've set off the silent alarm?"

"Well," and she draws out the word as she lies back onto the carpet to stare at the ceiling, "it's silent, so I'd really have no idea." He huffs at that, and she twists to look at him. "Can't you just, I don't know, bleep around with that to find out?" She waves in the direction of the screwdriver.

"_Bleep around?_ he echoes, and he's not sure whether to be amused or insulted. He comes down on the side of insulted. "I can't help but notice you're being spectacularly unhelpful."

She sits up again, scoots over to sit by the spot he's been kneeling for the past forty minutes. "Well, dusty old alien junk is really your territory, not mine."

"Ah," he smiles, savouring the familiar conversation as he manages to pop the last hinge. "So you're the brawns and I'm the brains of the outfit, I suppose."

She moves to the other side of the case, helps him lift the glass top off the display and onto the floor. "More like, I'm the sensible one and you're the one that wanders off in the middle of a firefight to marvel at some ancient shield modification gadget and nearly gets everyone killed."

"Hmph," he grumps, because he's looking at the scarab a bit closer now. "That was one time. And…" his voice trails off.

"What?'

"Oops?"

"What!?"

"It's not a religious relic from the Forgotten Temple of Elba."

She rolls her eyes for what seems like the hundredth time today. "It's just a regular old scarab?"

"Looks that way. A very poorly made one, at that. Definitely not top brand." He clears his throat nervously because he's just noticed the wires along the edges of the casing, and well. "Also, I seem to have tripped the silent alarm." He can see the bouncing lights of the guards' torches reflecting off the polished marble in the corridor. "I suggest-"

"- we run?" she finishes, grinning widely at him.

"Oh, don't look so pleased with yourself."

And run they do.

-

Her mobile rings as they're vaulting over the entry turnstiles. It startles her, and her foot catches. She trips.

"Shit," she mutters. "Shit, shit."

"Shh, you're all right," the Doctor soothes but he pulls her up, loops her arm around his neck and makes her lean her weight onto him. "Good?"

They manage to make it through the front doors, lose the guards in the crowded square outside. She sits on the rim of a fountain a few blocks down the road, calls in to Torchwood as the Doctor rolls her ankle gently. Nothing clicks too terribly under his fingers, which is always a good thing. Very breakable, these humans are.

"Not broken," he tells her when she shuts the phone.

"Good," and her face is very grave, "Because we're not nearly done for the night. There's been a crash. Unidentified extraterrestrial object, and we're closest."

-

The Doctor drives; he loves driving. Thank Rassilon for sprained ankles and extraterrestrial emergencies; Rose never lets him behind the wheel otherwise. She clings to the dashboard, looking a bit nauseous as he speeds down the twisting back roads.

"I have excellent reflexes," he assures her to no avail. "Far simpler than piloting the TARDIS, let me tell you." She glares at him; he pretends not to notice and presses harder on the gas pedal.

-

"Not even top brand, and still it winds up in a museum," she muses. Rose has moved past horror at his driving and into constant non-sequiter mode, his very favorite of her moods. They've been on the road for an hour now; he's surprised she took this long to get there.

"What? The scarab? It was a bit rubbish, yeah."

She nods, tipping her head against the glass to watch the countryside roll by. Her breath makes little clouds on the windowpane. "Maybe you should keep all my old jewelry when I die and sell it to some museum five million years from now. I'd like that; the Rose Tyler collection. All the tourists in their fanny packs lining up and snapping shots of my chintzy earrings, all because they're really old. You'd make a mint."

His jaw tightens a little because this isn't exactly his favorite subject in the universe. "Can we not, right this moment?"

"What?"

"The," and he waves his hand, watching the road. He wants to disappear the words. "The death talk. Can't it just, I don't know, stay the elephant in the room, lurking in the corner and eating peanuts?"

He can't meet her eyes; he tries not to listen to the sound of her breathing because when he does sometimes all he can think is that one day it'll stop, one day she'll be gone like all the others and there'll be no going back without a time machine, no hearing her lungs squeezing and whistling ever again. He'll be all alone in this insane backwards universe with no TARDIS and no Rose and really nothing at all.

Her fingers rest on his arm, and for a moment he's glad for the comfort, but then she's tapping harder, pointing off into the distance at a column of smoke curling up into the sky beyond the line of trees. "I think we've found it."

-

They fight their way through the underbrush and down into a ravine, trying not to trip as they fumble half-blind in the dark. She's holding the torch as she hobbles along behind him, the beam overlapping the glow of his screwdriver, cutting through the night.. The soft round edges of the light catch on something just ahead and the Doctor stops so abruptly that Rose runs into his back.

"No," he exhales softly, because there, smoking in the center of a small crater, is something that looks very much like the dented black and red hull of a Hornet 271. "It _can't_ be."

"It's," Rose says, and she's already by the doors. "It's a ship. It's a ship, yeah?" She's through the hatch before he can warn her to be careful. She pops back out a moment later, face dark. "The pilot's dead. It's pretty grim."

He nods but he's already tracing the engines with the pads of his fingers. "These are salvageable," he breathes and all of a sudden the universe is opening before him again. "I didn't think… I didn't think there'd be technology like this on Earth for two hundred years, at least."

Rose is watching him, her face unreadable. Her mobile rings.

They freeze, and the synthesized notes continue to chime, the only sounds in the stillness of the wood.

"How far can it go," she blurts urgently and he frowns, not quite understanding. "Doctor, tell me, how far will the engines reach?"

He blinks, looks hard at her. "Half this galaxy. Not much beyond that, but travel within this sector would be relatively easy."

Her mouth works silently for a long moment and he's never before wished so hard he knew what she was thinking. He's just about to reach out, brush temples with fingers when she shakes herself, looks up at him again. "If I call them back, tell them what we've found, Torchwood will have at least a hundred of these within a year."

"Yes," –and his voice comes out very soft because that's exactly what he's afraid of. "They will."

"They're idiots," she says abruptly. "You've seen it, I've seen it. I don't want them running loose all over the Milky Way just yet."

"Rose-" he starts and he can't quite believe it, really, he just can't. He never dared to hope but he knows the look in her eyes and it's like Christmas morning because all of a sudden he understands that it's going to be _his_. She should give the ship to Torchwood but instead she's giving it to _him_.

"Can you get it flying? Just enough so we can move it?"

There's an odd sort of rushing in his ears and he doesn't think he's ever loved her quite this much, and oh _Rassilon_ he does, he _loves_ her, and that's a revelation in itself.

The tide is sweeping over him and he's grinning so much his face is starting to ache with the strain. "It just so happens," he tells her warmly, "that dusty old alien junk is my particular specialty."

-

He finishes a connection under the navigation panel; the console sparks to life, engines and life support systems whirring softly.

Rose's voice is a low buzz outside the doors. "Got here, yeah," she tells whoever's on the other end of the line. "There's a crater, some debris. I think whatever it was must've mostly vaporized in the atmosphere, broke apart on impact. No signs of any survivors; bits of metal, mostly."

She falls silent a moment. "The Doctor? No, he's still in Beijing. Got into it with some stuffy professor-friend of his over some ancient Battle of Whats-it. I thought it'd be better to let him stay, get it all out of his system." Another break in the conversation and then she laughs. "Agreed. Men are men, human or no. I'll be here to meet the team."

He hears the snap of her phone and a moment later her shoes are visible from his spot under the console.

"You've got about twenty minutes."

He slides out to meet her eyes, to grin dangerously at her. "Plenty of time."

-

He cuts it very close but finally manages to break the encryption lock on the navigation controls, gets the steering back online. The hatch swishes satisfyingly as he steps out to where Rose stands in the ravine, watching the trees anxiously.

"Here soon," she murmurs when his shoulder bumps hers. "You need to go. Dad's got a house in the country where he stays on business. Should be empty right now. About an hour north of here; you remember it?"

He nods, squeezes her hand. She takes him by surprise, slides fingers behind his neck to pull him down. Their lips mash together; there is nothing romantic in the desperate way their teeth scrape. "Don't go running off to space without me, yeah?" and her voice is thick and rough like she's scared he actually might be considering it. Before he can reply, can tell her that he could never leave her behind, she's pushing him through the hatch as headlights flash in the distance.

-

It takes three weeks of effort to get the ship space-worthy.

Rose shows up two days after he executes a very shaky landing in front of Pete's country house, and he can't help but throw his arms around her and spin her until they're both dizzy with glee. He's gotten so used to her by his side that he missed her, even with a brand new ship to tinker with, even for two short days while she made sure Torchwood didn't catch on to what they'd done.

They work feverishly; there's no reason, no deadline, but every minute the Doctor's nearly shaking with anticipation. The laundry list of repairs seems endless but he's consumed, on fire, because when he gets the ship flying he can _leave_, can see new stars and new planets again and not be trapped on this very large rock inching slowly through its orbit. A prison is a prison, no matter how entertaining one's cellmates might be. He's just not built for a life standing still.

On the twenty-second day he climbs into her bed before the sun rises. He hasn't slept since they found the ship; he feels like he's coming back to life, consciousness all sharp and tingling like the pins and needles he gets when she lies atop his arm all night and he has to shake it out in the morning.

She shivers a little in her sleep as his legs brush hers, and he leans down to press lips to her hair, to wake her with soft touches. He likes her best in the mornings, warm and rumpled and bleary. His fingers slide where they want to, slowly find their way between her thighs and then quite suddenly she is wide-eyed and grinning up at him.

"Well," she says, voice scratchy with sleep. "Good morning to you, too."

He doesn't reply, instead brushes her hair out of her face and presses a very small kiss to the corner or her lips. She seems to catch his mood, lets her fingers trace up his neck to stroke his hairline as his fingers fumble and play. She moans a little, and her thighs fall open a bit farther.

"Turn over," he murmurs into her skin and she does, moving bonelessly against him. His hands wander as he leans in to taste the nape of her neck; they explore hipbones and breasts and belly until they finally slide up her arms to tangle with her fingers as he slides inside of her.

He takes his time, tries to respond to every twitch of her hips because he knows this could be their ending, the last time together. Her hair blurs in front of him; his eyes are wet and his cheeks are salty and he hopes that this isn't goodbye.

Afterwards, they lie together, tangled in cotton sheets. She stokes his cheekbone very carefully, touches her nose to his own.

"I'm taking it on a test flight," he blurts finally. "Today."

Her head tilts up, and he feels her lips touch the underside of his chin. "And by 'I', I'm assuming you mean 'we.'"

He shakes his head. "Rose, I've no idea if it works. It could burn up in the atmosphere for all I-"

"Don't be stupid," and when he pulls back to look down at her face she is deadly serious. "You already know I'm going with you, so why bother with the argument at all?"

-

They strap in as the engines warm up, and the Doctor checks and rechecks every setting and read-out on the navigation console to keep from thinking too much.

It's not much, just a space-hopper really. Only powerful enough for short trips, not for long-term space travel and if this works they'll still have to be based on Earth, still have to return to refuel and for repairs but at least they won't be so horribly _stuck_.

He wasn't lying to her; he really doesn't know if the ship will fly or if they'll explode in the atmosphere and be blown to tiny little Doctor-and-Rose pieces. No hope of regeneration in a fiery mid-atmosphere detonation, surely. He comes across the prospect of his own death so rarely that it always makes him a bit antsy when he's staring it in the face.

Rose, on the other hand, seems quite at ease, probably because she stares down the possibility of her own death every morning before breakfast. It's well and good for her to tell him he's the bravest man she knows, but it's easy to be brave when one's fairly sure they'll get out alive on the other side. All these small creatures with their one chance at life; well, he's never quite understood how they manage to face that kind of uncertainty each and every day.

"We could die," he says abruptly, and he half-wants her to convince him to call the whole thing off, to tell him that they should stay here and be satisfied with their cozy, safe little life on Earth. "Really and truly, we could die. The probability of death here is much higher than it was for any other pointless idiotic thing we've done, and yes, I am absolutely admitting we've done a lot of very stupid things in our time. But really, Rose, this one takes the cake."

He waits, fingers his safety harness and almost hopes that she'll agree, that she'll say 'yes, of course, you're right, why don't we go inside and have a cup of tea instead.'

But she doesn't, because she's Rose. "Well," she says instead and he looks over to see her grinning madly back at him, hair all askew because she'd been about to put on her helmet. "Of course we could. But what a way to go, yeah?"

He chuckles, and guns the engines.

-

Surprisingly enough, they don't die. The ship strains and shakes a bit passing the stratosphere and he has a panicked moment when he starts babbling apologies to her for everything he can think of, for being a shit mechanic and for never picking up his dirty socks and for using her as bait for that Giant Horned Grindelfrex last month, but she squeezes his hand and then the velocity just sort of _breaks_ and they're through, safely out of the clouds and into the weightless void of space.

He laughs out a long, shaky exhalation, both hearts still hammering wildly against his ribs. Rose is out of her seat and down the hall, already pressing against the rear port window as they begin to drift lazily into orbit.

"Oh, Doctor," she breathes rapturously and he follows the words down the passageway to press his nose up against the glass next to her, and there it is. Earth hangs below them, all blues and greens and swirly bits.

"You did it," and she chokes thickly on a happy sob, "Doctor, you did it, oh you did it."

Her face shines at the edges of his vision and he grabs her to him, hugs her tight and never wants to let go. "_We_ did it, Rose Tyler. You and me, we did it." He hiccups another chuckle into her hair, thinks he might not stop laughing ever.

Her arms clutch at his neck. "Love you," she whispers so fiercely into his ear that it makes him shiver. "I love you more than anything, you know that?"

It sounds like a challenge and he's burning for a challenge right now. He feels star-hot and reckless and he lifts her off her feet to get her closer. "Than anything? Across all the planets, all the stars? More than all that?" She says nothing, but the look in her eyes terrifies him in the very best way because _Rassilon_, it's true. It's really true.

"What do you say," he starts, and he feels better than he has in years, "to taking a spin around the rings of Saturn to start?"

She smiles, pulls out of the circle of his arm to lace their fingers together. They walk back to the cockpit, leaving the Earth behind.

 

 

6.) Beginnings

 

The memorial isn't quite as grand as he's always imagined; he'd felt far too empty to come up with something suitably creative to honor her memory. He'd tried long and hard, sitting alone in the dark on the cold wooden floor of their bedroom, but the best thing he'd managed to dream up were the cupcakes currently being passed around the room on a tray, pink frosted and sprinkled with edible ball bearings. Pitiful, really. He's been stuck on Earth for far too long.

Everyone they know who's still alive is crammed into their tiny cottage, the one in the hills they'd retired to when space travel started to make her too dizzy, with a small overgrown garden and a rickety swing on the porch and books, hundreds and hundreds of books filling up every possible corner of the space. He stands in the back of the parlour, barely listening as some work colleague drones on about her, about her commitment to the defense of the Earth and her bravery and her resourcefulness and blah blah blah.

He'd been a bit surprised through the numbness he's feeling at how few people there'd been for him to invite, how few friends they'd had. They never stayed in one place long enough for that sort of thing, he supposes, and now he can only wonder if she'd minded. He can only hope that she hadn't been lonely and he'd just been too blind to see it.

People are starting to trickle out now, moving around the room, exchanging hugs and well-wishes. He's barely spoken to anyone and barely anyone's tried speaking to him; so many of the Torchwood types are still perpetually ill at ease with him in the room. He'd asked Rose about it once, and she'd just smiled cheekily at him. "Well, you're a bit intimidating, aren't you? Oncoming Storm, Destroyer of Worlds, Bringer of Darkness, Terror in the Skies, Kicker of Puppies, Devourer-of-all-the-shrimp-at-the-buffet-line," and then she'd dissolved into laughter at his look. "Honestly, it's just too easy."

A firm hand on his arm pulls him abruptly out of the memory, and he opens his eyes to find himself staring at Nicholas Tyler, Rose's only surviving family. "Doctor," Nick says solemnly, with the strange sort of awed worshipfulness that he's had since the Doctor first met him at age five, that has always made the Doctor wonder what sort of absurd stories Rose'd been telling the poor boy about him for most of his young life. He strongly suspects they involved magical machines and heroic victories and perfectly happy endings. "Doctor, I'm so sorry for your loss."

"For yours as well," he responds, and means it. Nick had loved her dearly, and she him. His gaze falls on Nick's sweet wife, hovering unobtrusively behind him with their children. "Give my love to your family."

"I'm assuming," the other man says but his voice stops and he has to clear his throat. "I'm assuming we won't be seeing you again."

He looks at Nick, watching him so carefully and reverently; such a strange expression to see on a man well into his fifties, he thinks. Rassilon, he sees so much of Rose in him, in his eyes and his buck teeth and his humor. For a mad instant he wants to grab Nick by the arm, to say "Come with me, Nick Tyler, and I'll show you the world. I'll show you the world and the stars and things you couldn't even dream," because even without a TARDIS he's still the greatest adventurer this planet's ever known. He could do it, just to keep some tiny part of Rose with him for a few more years, and from the look on Nick's face he might very well say yes. But his eyes fall again on the sweet wife and the children, and he doesn't.

"No," the Doctor tells him instead. "No, I don't think you'll be seeing me again."

Nick nods, expecting the answer, and draws something from his coat pocket. "I know this is strange, but, well, Rose was nothing but strange. You'd know that better than anyone. She asked me to give you this after she- well."

He presses something flat and square into the Doctor's hand, an envelope. He looks down, turns it over. His left heart stops beating at the scrawled address: _To My Doctor_.

He's only vaguely aware of shaking Nick's hand goodbye, of the man squeezing his arm bracingly and telling him to find them if he needs anything, anything at all. Time rushes by him in a way he's craved ever since he stepped through the rift and left the TARDIS behind forever, and when he comes back into himself the house is empty and he's sitting on the sofa, envelope still clenched in his hand.

It's a letter, it must be. He's seen her address a letter this way once before, only just the once. He'd watched her silently across the room as she'd furiously scribbled ten pages, _ten pages_ of letter to a Doctor that wasn't him, a Doctor that still lay sleeping in the bed behind him. She'd been crying near the end of it, and he'd been trying to convince himself he wasn't at all jealous. He remembers being slightly appalled that she'd had ten pages worth of sentiment for this other Doctor, the one who'd kept the TARDIS instead of her. Now, well. Ten pages would be a blessing.

He rips open the flap and carefully removes the contents of the envelope, his hand only a little shaky. His stomach falls when he realizes it's only one bit of paper, a worn orange flier for some sort of community center. He flips it over a bit desperately, and sees the short note on the back in her achingly familiar handwriting.

The date at the top is from nearly eleven years ago.

_This came to Mum's flat in an envelope addressed to me before she died. I knew it was a message, something important, but I could never make heads or tails of it. I thought maybe it was to help me get over losing Mum but when I looked them up, there wasn't any Alfred Newsome Memorial Community Center in Surrey at all, so I just kept it for years. Then today in the paper there was a story about a tech millionaire dying and leaving most of his estate to public works and education projects. Alfred Newsome. They're going to use part of the fund to build a new community center that they're naming for him, but they haven't even broken ground for it yet. And that's when I realized. It wasn't a message for me at all. It was a message for you._

Be well, my darling. All my love, across all the stars and universes.  
Rose

He sits for a long time, reading and re-reading, before he can bear to turn the flier over. The paper is soft and creased from age, the black ink starting to fade into grey.

** The Alfred Newsome Memorial Community Center  
10 Parkhill Road, Weybridge, Surrey**

Have you experienced a major loss?

Has your life changed or will change?

Do you wonder whether there is a future for you or what it will be like?

Remember, you are not alone.

WE HAVE BEEN THERE, AND SURVIVED

GRIEF COUNSELING AND SUPPORT GROUP

Led by Dr. Tara Tahako

Free of charge to the community*

Every Wednesday, 7 pm in Rec Room B

*made possible by SpeedyMart, BlueStar Copy and Printing, and Bad Wolf Brewery

 

Today is Tuesday. He packs a bag.

-

He strides into the Alfred Newsome Memorial Community Center in Weybridge at precisely 6:37 pm on Wednesday. He couldn't help being early; he's been on edge all day, on edge in a way he hasn't been since the war, mind racing and looping all in circles. Is it possible? He's always thought of death as an ending, as finality, but the Bad Wolf had shot that all to hell with Jack Harkness after all. She'd had all of creation in her head and she'd wanted them together, the both of them always together, always the Doctor and Rose. Maybe she's given him a way back to her.

He stops outside Rec Room B; a crisp, freshly printed version of the worn orange flier he has folded in his coat pocket hangs on the door, swinging precariously from a single piece of tape. He grins, and pushes into the room.

There is a young, nervous-looking man wearing a staff t-shirt who is shuffling beverages and a plate of lemon bars on a table near the entry; he glances up at the Doctor, startled. "Oh! Are you here for the grief counseling meeting? Dr. Tahako should be here in a moment. We weren't sure whether or not to expect anyone; this is the first meeting of the group. We've only had fliers up a few days."

He'd planned to be an inspector from a council board of something-or-other, he's got the psychic paper handy and everything, but for some reason what comes out of his mouth is "I am, yes. Here for the meeting."

"Ah," the young man says, and with a bit of difficulty manages to school his features into something approximating sympathy. "Have you recently experienced a loss?"

"My wife," he says shortly, even though that bit isn't remotely true. The boy's grimace becomes more pronounced.

"I see. I'm sorry for your loss."

"She was seventy-four," the Doctor adds off-handedly, just because he wants to see the look on his face. Humans and their silly age hang-ups.

"Ah," the boy says again, sounding a bit choked. "I'll just-" and then he is gone, leaving the Doctor blissfully alone with Rec Room B.

He sets to work immediately, pacing the perimeter of the room, tapping the walls, checking the resonance frequencies with his screwdriver. He quickly finds what he's looking for, a small access panel behind a stack of plastic crates filled with construction paper and tubes of glitter. He shoves the crates aside, settles on the ground beside the panel with legs folded under himself, and begins to pry it away. His hearts are hammering in his ears and all he can hear is the hum of his own thoughts, _Rose Rose Rose Rose_.

The panel slides free and he can feel it there at the threshold, a surge of gamma radiation and the hum of a portal. He's meant to go through, he knows it. The Bad Wolf's brought him here and there's got to be a reason. He looks up at the clock on the wall, just as the hands slip to 7 pm.

He slides head first through the portal, and falls squarely on his face.

-

Once he manages to get himself up, he brushes off his suit, still the one he wore to the funeral, and looks around. He's in a different time, he's sure of that. There's no mistaking the frisson of energy you get from a time portal; his nerves are positively jumping from it. He's just starting to notice his surroundings (a space base, possibly), when a door swings outward from the wall to his left. He freezes, not at all breathing in the anticipation.

A brown-topped, bespectacled, extraordinarily familiar face pokes around the thick, metal door. "Oh, hullo!" the other Doctor says brightly. "It's you again!" and everything, all the hope and anticipation and dread comes crashing down around him.

The other Doctor comes fully around the door; he turns again and must notice the state of him, the rumpled black suit and the circles under the eyes and the soul-crushing despair, because he steps closer and breathes out a soft _"Oh."_.

He slumps against the wall, suddenly exhausted. Fingers the same shape as his own circle his elbows, gripping tightly and anchoring him firmly into the world. "I'm so sorry," the Doctor who isn't him murmurs from somewhere in front of him. "I am so very, very sorry."

He manages to force his eyes open to look himself in the face and the searing compassion and understanding he sees there breaks something inside of him, that odd little dam built of pride and fear that's keeping back the flood. "Thank you, oh thank you" he grinds out gratefully, and throws his arms around the other Doctor's thin shoulders. He feels arms wrap around his back, hugging him tightly and somehow that makes everything just a bit less horrible. They stay that way for a long time, leaning against each other and breathing in and out until the other Doctor chuckles softly in his ear.

"What?" he asks, the word muffled by brown pinstripes.

"D'you see? She saw everything, all the stars and the universes and all of creation. She saw all her life and all our lives and hundreds of millions of billions of lives and out of all that, out of that absurd amount of something, she thought to give you this."

He can't say anything to that.

"She loved you," the other Doctor says, and he can hear the smile even though he's not looking at his face. "She loved you so very much."

"She did," he agrees, and there is a lightness growing in him, lifting from his toes up into his chest. "She loved you, too."

"I know she did." The other Doctor pulls back, stares deep into his face, and there is something like joy burning in his eyes, depthless as all of space and time. "I've been there. I survived. Life goes on."

And all in that moment, the Doctor understands. He remembers the things he used to know, things he's forgotten in fifty-some years of living a small human life one day after the other, things about the vastness of space and the endlessness of time and the sheer wealth of potential in the universe. She brought him here to witness it, to see and to remember that there is life without her and beyond her. She brought him here to remember who he is.

The other Doctor is grinning now and it's like the sunrise. "You've got your spaceship. You've got a ship, and a whole new universe to explore. There's nothing better than that." Something presses into his hand: an envelope. A yellowed envelope addressed to him in Rose's looping scrawl.

"I never opened it," the other Doctor tells him. "It was always for you, I think."

The letter is heavy in his hand, and he remembers watching her write it all those years ago, remembers how he sat in the dark and longed to know what it said. He smiles, because his hearts may burst from this. Ten pages of letter and a brand new universe.

He grins. She loved him.

She loved him, he'll survive, and life goes on.

 

 

-the end


End file.
